Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician and autodidact. Here is a time line of his life:
- 1887 - Ramanujan was bron in Erode, Madras Presidency (now Tamil Nadu, India) as Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyenger.
- 1892 - He was enrolled at the local school.
- 1894 - He was moved to a Telugu medium school.
- 1897 - He passed his primary examinations in English, Tamil, geography and arithmetic. The same year, Ramanujan entered Town Higher Secondary School where he encountered formal mathematics for the first time.
- 1898 - He was introduced to a book on advanced trigonometry written by S. L. Loney.
- 1900 - He completely mastered that book by the age of 13.
- 1902 - He was introduced to solving cubic equations. Later on he went on to find his own method to solve the quartics.
- 1903 - Ramanujan obtained a copy of a book, containing 5000 theorems, titled A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics by G. S. Carr. The book is acknowledged as a key element in awakening the genius of Ramanujan.
- 1904 - He had independently developed and investigated the Bernoulli numbers and had calculated the Euler–Mascheroni constant up to 15 decimal places. The same year, he graduated from Town Higher Secondary School with the K. Ranganatha Rao prize for his outstanding performance in mathematics.
- 1906 - Ramanujan failed his Fellow of Arts exam successively.
- 1907 - He left college without a degree and continued to pursue independent research in mathematics.
- 1909 - Ramanujan was married to Srimathi Janaki (Janakiammal).
- 1910 - He suffered from poor health and had to undergo a surgery.
- 1911 - Ramanujan's first paper, a 17-page work on Bernoulli numbers, was published in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society while he was holding a clerical past with the Madras Port Trust.
- 1913 - The publication of his paper helped him gain attention for his works, and soon he was popular among the mathematical fraternity in India. Wishing to further explore research in mathematics, Ramanujan began a correspondence with the acclaimed English mathematician, Godfrey H. Hardy.
- 1914 - Ramanujan travelled to England and worked alongside Hardy who mentored and collaborated with the young Indian.
- 1916 - Ramanujan was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree by research (this degree was later renamed PhD) for his work on highly composite numbers, the first part of which was published as a paper in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society.
- 1917 - He was elected to the London Mathematical Society.
- 1918 - He became a Fellow of the Royal Society as the second Indian to do so, following Ardaseer Cursetjee in 1841, and at age 31 he was one of the youngest Fellows in the history of the Royal Society.
- 1919 - Ramanujan returned to Kumbakonam, Madras Presidency.
- 1920 - He died at the age of 32 only.
Plenty of mathematicians, Hardy knew, could follow a step-by-step discursus unflaggingly—yet counted for nothing beside Ramanujan. Years later, he would contrive an informal scale of natural mathematical ability on which he assigned himself a 25 and Littlewood a 30. To David Hilbert, the most eminent mathematician of the day, he assigned an 80. To Ramanujan he gave 100.