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India's number theorist Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar (22 December 1887–26 April 1920) was one of the greatest mathematicians. A poor Brahmin by birth, Ramanujan grew up in Erode, Tamil Nadu, and was homeschooled with little formal education.

Ramanujan learned higher mathematics from one book and started working independently on number theory, infinite series, continued fractions, and partitions of numbers. He sent a celebrated letter to English mathematician G.H. Hardy at Cambridge in 1913, who took him to England in 1914.

They went on to do brilliant work, such as the Hardy-Ramanujan asymptotic formula. Ramanujan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918—one of the youngest ever. He tended to find results without proof, many still to be found.

Ramanujan was unwell in England. Ramanujan returned home in 1919 and died on 26 April 1920 at the young age of 32. He is remembered through notions such as the mock theta function and Ramanujan primes, impacting contemporary mathematics.