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Srinivasa Ramanujan Was Born in India in 1887. A Brilliant and Largely Self

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a self-taught Indian mathematician who made significant contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions. One of his remarkable discoveries was a formula for calculating the number of partitions of any positive whole number. A partition is a way of expressing a number as a sum of other numbers. For example, the number 5 can be partitioned in seven ways. While finding an exact formula is difficult, Ramanujan's approximation formula becomes increasingly accurate as the numbers get larger.

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136 views

Srinivasa Ramanujan Was Born in India in 1887. A Brilliant and Largely Self

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a self-taught Indian mathematician who made significant contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions. One of his remarkable discoveries was a formula for calculating the number of partitions of any positive whole number. A partition is a way of expressing a number as a sum of other numbers. For example, the number 5 can be partitioned in seven ways. While finding an exact formula is difficult, Ramanujan's approximation formula becomes increasingly accurate as the numbers get larger.

Uploaded by

Bipin Bani
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© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in India in 1887.

A brilliant and largely selftaught mathematician, he came to work and study at Cambridge University in 1914. He was particularly good at seeing relationships and patterns in number sequences. Ramanujan died aged just 33 mathematicians are still finding new ideas in the brilliant work he left behind. One of the amazing number theories that he found was a formula giving the number of partitions for any positive whole number. A partition is a way of expressing a number as a sum of other numbers. If you look at a small number like 5 there are seven different partitions, as shown in the box. 5=1+1+1+1+ 1 5=2+1+1+1 5=2+2+1 1. List all the possible partitions for the number 3. 2. List all the possible partitions for the number 4. Check your answers with somebody else. Look at the way that they have set out their answers. Can you think of a way of writing down all the answers, without missing or repeating any? 3. Use this method to write down all the partitions for 4. Find all 15 partitions for the number 7. 5=3+1+1 5=3+2 5=4+1 5=5 the number 6.

The number of partitions gets bigger very quickly! For example, the number 100 has 190,569,292 partitions. There are 3,972,999,029,388 partitions for the number 200.

Teachers Notes Although finding the formula for the number of partitions will not be possible (see Mathematical Background, below), the search for the partitions of a number is a valuable exercise in itself. Students are of course required to think and work systematically. A rather different approach is required from the standard investigations of the Ice Cream Cones type, where all the different combinations can be found by an orderly approach to counting. Here, an element of informal recursive thinking helps: In working out the partitions for 6, one of the partitions is 1 + 5. However, if we already know the partitions for 5, we can use these to build our list of partitions for 6 fairly quickly

Approached in this way, this forms a challenging but accessible task suitable for Key Stage 3 students. It is also well suited to collaborative work, as students can work together to check for omissions and repetitions. A more formal approach, including looking at Ramanujans formula, requires much more advanced mathematics but may be a suitable activity at ALevel!

Mathematical Background
Ramanujans formula is fairly remarkable! The approximate number of partitions for the integer n is written as p(n), and is given is given by the formula:

2n exp 3 p( n ) 4n 3
The formula never gives the exact number of partitions for a number. However, the ratio between the value predicted by the formula and the actual number of partitions tends to 1 as n tends to infinity! The graph and table below show what happens for the first few values of n: Term Number (n) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Value of Function 1.87667042 2.71516043 4.09051199 6.10009567 8.94145915 12.8819271 18.2671641 Actual Number of partitions 1 2 3 5 7 11 15

20 15 10 5 Number of Partitions 0 0 1 2
Formula Actual

Term Number

Although the difference between predicted and actual values grows, the ratio of predicted value to actual value tends toward 1, as a check on the numbers in the table will show. Another mathematician, Hans Rademacher (a German refugee from the Nazis) found an exact but much more complicated formula, in the USA in the 1940s.

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