The Ramanujan Museum is a small, earnest institution in the Royapuram neighbourhood dedicated to preserving the memory of Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920), one of the greatest self-taught mathematical geniuses in history.
Ramanujan grew up in Kumbakonam in Tamil Nadu, had almost no formal mathematical education, and yet produced results in number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions that astonished Cambridge mathematicians when his letters reached G.H. Hardy in 1913. He died in 1920, aged 32, having produced a body of work that mathematicians are still fully unpacking.
The museum occupies a single room and operates on very modest resources. It contains photographs, documents, letters, and reproductions of Ramanujan's notebooks — the loose collections of mathematical results that he kept throughout his life. There's a small library and a bust. The curator is usually present and genuinely enthusiastic about explaining Ramanujan's work to non-mathematicians.
It's a place for people with a specific interest in Ramanujan or the history of mathematics, not a polished cultural institution. But for those who know the story, it's touching.