The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily.

In 1913, a young man from the city of Madras and British India

sent a letter to one of the world's preeminent mathematicians, G.A.

Hardy in Cambridge University in England.

The young man had no formal education in advanced mathematics.

Yet that letter would end up changing the landscape of mathematics for the rest of the 20th century.

Learn more about the legendary Srena Vasa Ramanujan, one of the world's most gifted natural mathematicians,

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. On December 22nd, 1887, Sri V Vasa Ramanujan was born into a Brahmin family in what is today the

southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

His father was a clerk who spent much of his time working to support his family.

His mother, who was a devout Hindu, brought him up,

and passed along her religious devotion to her son.

While he didn't enjoy his first attempts at school,

he eventually excelled.

At the age of 10 10 he had passed his primary

school exams with the highest scores in the district. He was advanced a

secondary school where it soon became evident that he was a mathematical

prodigy. By the age of 11 he had exhausted the two university students who

were renting a room from his family. He was given a book on trigonometry which he

taught himself and had fully completed by the age of 13. When he was 16 he was given a copy of a synopsis of elementary

results in pure and applied mathematics by British mathematician G.S. Carr, which was a collection

of over 5,000 mathematical theorems.

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