# The Letter from Madras *A Biography of Ramanujan* — Legendary Biographies No. 094 - **Subject:** Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar - **Written by:** Ailsa Rennie - **Shelf:** Science / Science - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 212 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 212 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-093-5) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Miles Ashby (ISBN 979-8-90623-164-2) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/094-the-letter-from-madras.html ## About this book He was born Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar on December 22, 1887, in Erode, Tamil Nadu, the eldest son of a Brahmin clerk in a sari shop. He failed out of Government College in Kumbakonam because he refused to study anything but mathematics. He worked as a clerk at the Madras Port Trust on a salary of 25 rupees a month. On January 16, 1913, at twenty-five, he sent a letter containing 120 theorems to G. H. Hardy at Trinity College, Cambridge. Hardy and his collaborator J. E. Littlewood spent three months working through the letter, decided the theorems were the work of a self-taught genius rather than a crank, and brought him to Cambridge in April 1914. Ailsa Rennie's biography opens in Erode and follows the arc through the early visionary years in which a Madras Brahmin teenager in a tropical-textile-trade port city was deriving on his own most of the modular-forms and partition-theory results that the European mathematical community had taken Euler, Gauss, and Jacobi to produce. The book traces the Hardy correspondence, the 1914-1919 Cambridge years, the 1916 Fellowship of the Royal Society election at twenty-eight, the long tuberculous decline in English sanatoriums, the 1919 return to India, the eighty-three pages of the Lost Notebook that George Andrews found at Trinity in 1976 and that the field is still finishing, and the death at thirty-two on April 26, 1920. What emerges is a portrait of the Madras port-trust clerk whose letter the Cambridge mathematical establishment took three months to read seriously, and whose results the field is, more than a century later, still finishing to prove. ## Contents 1. The House on Sarangapani Street 2. The Book That Was a Map 3. The Dropout 4. The Letter 5. Cambridge 6. The War and the Body 7. Hardy 8. The Infinite Series 9. The Partition Function 10. The Notebooks 11. Number Theory and the Primes 12. The Goddess of Namagiri 13. Colonial Mathematics 14. The Body in England 15. The Mock Theta Functions 16. The Last Year 17. The Afterlife of the Notebooks 18. The Notebooks Are Still Right 19. The Lost Notebook ## Questions **Who is The Letter from Madras about?** Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Letter from Madras — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,724 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 64,000 words, 19 chapters, 212 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Ailsa Rennie writes biography out of Edinburgh, with a focus on women in twentieth-century science, art, and letters whose work was historically credited to the men in the rooms beside them. Her writing uncovers forgotten archival papers to reconstruct the lived realities of intellectual collaboration. Through works like Compound S, The Fossil Hunter, and The Birkbeck Years, she examines the institutional structures that obscured female achievement. She also explores these themes of lost legacy and ownership in The Paris Radium Institute and The Letter from Madras. She lives in the Edinburgh suburbs, where she spends her weekends restoring antique bookbindings and volunteering at a local community orchard.