Cadambathur Tiruvenkatacharlu Rajagopal was born on 22nd December 1887 in Erode, India. He is definately one of India's greatest mathematical geniuses. From early childhood it was evident that he was a child prodigy. Senior students used to go to his small house to get their difficulties in mathematics solved. At the age of 13 he was able to get Loney's trigonometry from a college library. Not only was he able to master the difficult book but he also began his own research.

Mathematical ideas began to come in such a flood to his mind that he was not able to write all of them down. He used to do problems on loose sheets of paper or on a slate and jotted the results down in a notebook. These notebooks became famous as Ramanujan's frayed notebook and are sill being studied by mathematicians to prove or disprove his formulas.

Sometime in 1913, Ramanujan wrote a letter to the great mathematician G.H Hardy of Cambridge University in which he set out 120 theorems and formulae. It did not take long for Hardy and his colleagues to figure out that they had unearthed a rare mathematical genius and they invited him to visit them in England. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society and became only the second Indian to receive this distinguised fellowship. In October that year, he became the first Indian to be elected Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

The picture above is taken from a stamp issued by the Indian Post Office to celebrate the 75th anniversary of his birth.