Context:

The Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians was awarded to Professor Neena Gupta, a mathematician of the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, in a virtual ceremony on 22nd February 2022.

• She received the award for the year 2021 for her outstanding work in affine algebraic geometry and commutative algebra.

About the Ramanujan Prize:

=> The prize is awarded annually to a researcher from a developing country funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) of the Government of India in association with ICTP (International Centre for Theoretical Physics) and the International Mathematical Union (IMU).

=> Eligibility: It is given to young mathematicians less than 45 years of age who have conducted outstanding research in a developing country.

=> It is supported by DST in the memory of Srinivasa Ramanujan.

Highlights of Srinivasa Ramanujan’s life:

=> In 1911, Ramanujan published the first of his papers in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society.

=> Ramanujan traveled to England in 1914, where Hardy tutored him and collaborated with him in some research.

=> He worked out the Riemann series, the elliptic integrals, hypergeometric series, the functional equations of the zeta function, and his own theory of divergent series.

=> The number 1729 is known as the Hardy-Ramanujan number after a famous visit by Hardy to see Ramanujan at a hospital.

=> It is the smallest number which can be expressed as the sum of two different cubes in two different ways. Hardy observed Ramanujan’s work primarily involved fields less known even amongst other pure mathematicians.

=> Ramanujan’s home state of Tamil Nadu celebrates 22 December as ‘State IT Day’, memorialising both the man and his achievements, as a native of Tamil Nadu.

=> Ramanujan compiled around 3,900 results consisting of equations and identities. One of his most treasured findings was his infinite series for

• The Dev Patel-starrer ‘The Man Who Knew Infinity’ (2015) was a biopic on the mathematician.