Abdus Salam as child prodigy

Some extracts from biograhpy of Dr. Salam.


At the age of 17, as a student of BA, he wrote his first research paper titled A Problem of Ramanujan, which was published in the college journal Mathematics Student. His classmate Ram Prakash Bambah, later Dr Bambah, recalled that in 1942 when Dr Chawla posed the unsolved problem of the legendary Indian mathematician Sirinavasan Ramanujan regarding four simultaneous equations in the four variables, the 16-year-old Salam solved it in three days, suggesting that ‘the four variables were the roots of a quadratic whose coefficients could be found by solving a cubic’. This, at the age of 16!