The Birthday of Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887)

Ramanujan was a self‑taught genius from rural India who sent 120 theorems to G. H. Hardy at Cambridge. His notebooks contain thousands of identities, many seemingly impossible – such as the infinite continued fraction for the Rogers–Ramanujan identities and the approximation to π: 1/π = (2√2/9801) Σ (4k)!(1103+26390k)/(k!⁴ 396⁴ᵏ). He had an intuition for numbers: when Hardy visited him in hospital (taxi number 1729), Ramanujan noted it is the smallest number expressible as sum of two cubes in two ways: 1729 = 1³+12³ = 9³+10³. He died at 32, leaving a legacy that still guides number theory.