Named in memory of Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920), the Indian mathematical genius who has been classed with Euler {see planet  (2002)} and Jacobi and is regarded as one of the truly great algorists in the history of mathematics. His work on the theory of partitions, done in Cambridge in collaboration with Hardy, won him worldwide recognition, and he became the first Indian mathematician to be elected a fellow of the Royal Society. The Hardy-Ramanujan theory led to the circle method, which is today one of the most powerful tools in analytic number theory. Ramanujan gave an analytic expression for pi that has been used on powerful digital computers to generate accurate values to seventeen million decimal places. Terminally ill, he returned to India in 1919 and spent his last year in Madras on further mathematical investigations, which he recorded in a notebook. This notebook was subsequently lost, eventually to be retrieved... _ _.