Chakravarthi Padmanabhan Ramanujam (9 January 1938 – 27 October 1974) was an Indian mathematician who worked in the fields of number theory and algebraic geometry.
[1] As David Mumford put it, Ramanujam felt that the spirit of mathematics demanded of him not merely routine developments but the right theorem on any given topic.
He was sometimes tormented by the difficulty of these high standards, but in retrospect, it is clear to us how often he succeeded in adding to our knowledge, results both new, beautiful and with a genuinely original stamp".
Ramanujam was born to a Tamil family on 9 January 1938 in Madras (now Chennai), India, as the eldest of seven, to Chakravarthi Srinivasa Padmanabhan.
In his letter of recommendation Father Charles Racine wrote:-"He has certainly originality of mind and the type of curiosity which is likely to suggest that he will develop into a good research worker if given sufficient opportunity.
"With Father Charles Racine's encouragement and recommendation, Ramanujam applied and was admitted to the graduate school at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay.
"He could reduce difficult solutions to be simple and elegant due to his deep knowledge of the subject matter" states Ramanan.
He studied not only algebraic geometry and analytic number theory of which he displayed a deep knowledge but he became an expert in several other allied subjects as well".
A little-known fact is that during this time he started teaching himself German, Italian, Russian and French so that he could study mathematical works in their original form.
In 1964, based on his participation in the International Colloquium on Differential Analysis, he earned the respect of Alexander Grothendieck and of David Mumford, who invited him to Paris and Harvard.
There he met the young student Chitikila Musili, who later went on to prove interesting results in the geometry connected with the theory of Lie groups and wrote good expository books.
Mumford writes that he spent many delightful evenings with Ramanujam and that his presence contributed importantly to the success of the algebraic geometry year.
Back in India after his year at the University of Warwick, Ramanujam requested for a professorship at the Tata Institute but to be made tenable in their Bangalore campus.