Ramchundra (Hindi

Hindi

Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...

: रामचन्द्र लाल ) (1821 – 1880) was British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

's first major mathematician

Mathematician

A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....

. His book, Treatise on Problems of Maxima and Minima, was promoted by the prominent mathematician Augustus De Morgan

Augustus De Morgan

Augustus De Morgan was a British mathematician and logician. He formulated De Morgan's laws and introduced the term mathematical induction, making its idea rigorous. The crater De Morgan on the Moon is named after him....

.

De Morgan, in his Introduction to Ramchundra's book says that he was born in 1821 in Panipat

Panipat

Panipat بَنِبَت is an ancient and historic city in Panipat district, Haryana state, India. It is 90 km north from Delhi and 169 km south of Chandigarh on NH-1. The three battles fought at the city were turning points in Indian history. The city is famous in India by the name of "City of...

 to Sunder Lal (सुन्दर लाल), a Kayasth of Delhi. De Morgan came to know of Ramchundra when, in 1850, he was sent by a friend a work on maxima and minima

Maxima and minima

In mathematics, the maximum and minimum of a function, known collectively as extrema , are the largest and smallest value that the function takes at a point either within a given neighborhood or on the function domain in its entirety .More generally, the...

 by the 29-year old self-taught mathematician. Ramchundra had published his book at his own expense in Calcutta in that year. De Morgan arranged for the book to be republished in London under his own supervision.

De Morgan was so impressed that he undertook to bring Ramchundra's work to the notice of scientific men of Europe.

Charles Muses

Charles Musès

Charles A Muses , was an esoteric philosopher who wrote articles and books under various pseudonyms . He founded the Lion Path, a shamanistic movement...

, in an article in the Mathematical Intelligencer

Mathematical Intelligencer

The Mathematical Intelligencer is a mathematical journal published by Springer Verlag that aims at a conversational and scholarly tone, rather than the technical and specialist tone more common amongst such journals.-Mathematical Conversations:...

(1998) called Ramchundra "De Morgan's Ramanujan". He was mystified why, in spite of De Morgan's efforts to make this "remarkable Hindu algebraist known, he does not appear in most texts on history of mathematics."

Ramchundra was teacher of science in Delhi College for some time. In 1858, he was native head master in Thomason Civil Engineering College (now Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee) at Roorkee

Roorkee

Roorkee is a city and seat of a municipal council in Uttarakhand, in far northern India. It is located on the banks of the Ganges canal on the national highway between Delhi and Dehradun. Roorkee is known for Roorkee Cantonment, one of the country's oldest cantonments, and the headquarters of...

. Later that year, he was appointed head master of a school in Delhi.