speech on ramanujan birthday
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December 22nd would have been the 127th birthday of the legendary Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. His story really is remarkable. Born in 1887 in a small village around 400km from Madras (now Chennai), Ramanujan developed a passion for maths very early on. By age 15 he routinely solved maths problems that went way beyond what his classmates were dealing with. He worked out his own method for solving quartic equations, for example, and even had a go at quintic ones (and failed of course, since the general quintic is unsolvable). But since he neglected all other subjects apart from maths, Ramanujan never got into university, and was forced to continue studying maths alone and in poverty. Only after a plea to an eminent mathematician, who described Ramanujan as "A short uncouth figure, stout, unshaven, not over clean," did Ramanujan eventually get a job as a clerk at the Madras Port Trust.