Srinivasa Ramanujan

Did you know the number 1729 hides a clever secret? It’s famous because Srinivasa Ramanujan, a brilliant Indian mathematician, pointed out that 1729 is the smallest number you can write as two different sums of two cubes: 1^3 + 12^3 and 9^3 + 10^3.

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920) lived in the early 1900s. He was mostly self-taught and filled tiny notebooks with thousands of surprising formulas. The main thing to remember is his incredible intuition: he could see deep patterns in numbers that few others noticed.

In 1913 he wrote to the British mathematician G. H. Hardy, who invited him to Cambridge. Together they worked on number theory — studies of whole numbers, partitions (ways to break numbers into parts), infinite series, and mysterious 'mock theta' formulas. Many of his formulas had no proofs at first; later mathematicians proved many and found new ideas inside his notes. In 1918 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Although he died young in 1920, Ramanujan’s notebooks continue to guide research today. His story shows how curiosity, creativity, and persistence can reveal hidden beauty in math. So when you play with numbers or spot patterns, remember Ramanujan—the man who listened to the music of numbers and taught the world to listen too.