RAMANUJAN’S well-connected friends secured him a research post at Madras University, and in 1913 encouraged him to contact eminent mathematicians in England.* GH Hardy was so excited by what he saw that he wrote to the India Office immediately about bringing Ramanujan to Cambridge.
Ramanujan, a devoted Hindu, had been brought up to believe foreign travel would be a defilement, but his mother told him the family goddess had appeared and pronounced her blessing. So Ramanujan spent five years collaborating with Hardy, and in 1918 became the first Indian to be elected Fellow of Trinity College. He continued to work as if Mathematics had befriended him, unfolding herself in flashes of insight which he rarely bothered to prove, though nearly all of them were right, and still spark new discoveries today.*
Srinivasa suffered from chronic illness all his life, and in Cambridge his health began to deteriorate seriously. He returned to Madras in 1919, and died in Kumbakonam on April 26th, 1920, aged 32.
Edgar Middlemast helped Ramanujan with his letters, and Gilbert Walker, a mathematician at Trinity College in Cambridge and a friend of Sir Francis Spring, helped him win his place at Madras University.
“Hardy said that this was the most singular experience of his life” wrote CP Snow: “what did modern mathematics look like to someone who had the deepest insight, but who had literally never heard of most of it?”