Where did Srinivasa Ramanujan grow up and live?

📍Erode, Tamil Nadu, India

1887 – 1919

“I was born on the 22nd of December 1887 in Erode, but my family moved immediately to Kumbakonam in the Thanjavur district, where I grew up. My father worked as a clerk in a sari shop there and my mother Komalatammal sang devotional songs at the Sarangapani Temple near our home on Sarangapani Sannidhi Street. I showed mathematical ability so extreme that it appeared almost supernatural from an early age: I could see patterns and relationships in numbers that no one around me could follow, and I had no formal training in advanced mathematics — only a copy of Carr's Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics, which I worked through and then far beyond. I wrote to G.H. Hardy at Cambridge in 1913 enclosing theorems I had derived, and Hardy recognised immediately that he was reading the work of a genius. I came to Cambridge in 1914 and the cold and the food and the isolation damaged my health irreparably. I returned to India in 1919 and died the following year at thirty-two.”

👍 LovedThe mathematical intuition that arrived fully formed, as if from outside — the goddess Namagiri of Namakkal appearing in dreams to write equations. The Tamil Brahmin tradition that gave me a framework for understanding mathematical truth as something discovered rather than invented.

👎 DislikedThe poverty that limited my access to education and to the wider mathematical world. The cold and the food restrictions of Cambridge, which worsened my tuberculosis. The thirty-two years that were enough to produce mathematics that mathematicians are still working through a century later — but not enough.

Map showing where Srinivasa Ramanujan lived — Erode, Tamil Nadu, India

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of Srinivasa Ramanujan's home at Erode, Tamil Nadu, India

📍 Street view today

Sources: Kanigel, R. The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (1991), Charles Scribner's Sons; Hardy, G.H. A Mathematician's Apology (1940), Cambridge University Press; Berndt, B. Ramanujan's Notebooks (1985-1998), Springer