Let $\sigma\_{11}(n)$ denote the sum of the 11th powers of the positive integral divisors of the positive integer n.
Let $\tau(n)$ denote Ramanujan's tau function, which is the coefficient of $q^n$ in the power series $q \Pi\_{n=1}^{\infty} (1-q^{n})^{24}$.
It was proven by Hecke that if $n$ is a positive integer, the number of vectors of length $\sqrt{2n}$ in the Leech lattice is $\frac{65520}{691}( \sigma\_{11}(n) - \tau(n) )$. The integrality of this number implies the congruence of $\sigma\_{11}(n)$ and $\tau(n)$ modulo 691, but this congruence is often called Ramanujan's congruence.
Ramanujan worked before the discovery of the Leech lattice, so he must have had some other way of proving the congruence. How did he prove it?



Proving Congruence Without Leech Lattice
Some historical comments should not be out of place. I'm writing them without checking the facts.


Ramanujan published his paper in 1916 under the modest title *On some arithmetical functions*. He made a number of conjectures about the $\tau$-function such as $\tau(mn)=\tau(m)\tau(n)$ whenever $\gcd(m,n)=1$, and a recursive formula for $\tau(p^{r+2})$ in terms of $\tau(p^{r+1})$ and $\tau(p^r)$, for primes $p$.


These were proved by Mordell in 1918 using methods which prefigure the use of Hecke operators. Now they are a consequence of Hecke's theory when you remark that the $\Delta$-function is a primitive cuspidal eigenform of weight $12$ and level $1$. All this was before the discovery of the Leech lattice by Witt in 1940 (unpublished, but see his *Collected Papers*).


Ramanujan made a second set of conjectures about congruences satisfied by $\tau(n)$ modulo $2^{11}$, $3^7$, $5^3$, $7$, $23$ and $691$, some of which he proved (for example for $691$). It was thinking about these congruences, and about Swinnerton-Dyer's approach to them (see *Modular forms in one variable* and Serre's talk in the Delange-Pisot-Poitou seminar) that led Serre in the early 70s to the conjecture that there is an $l$-adic ($l$ prime) representation of $\operatorname{Gal}(\bar Q|Q)$ attached to every primitive cuspidal eigenform --- conjecture proved by Deligne (see his Bourbaki talk).


These congruences also led Serre to formulate the first form of his conjecture about the modularity of odd irreducible representations $\operatorname{Gal}(\bar Q|Q)\rightarrow\operatorname{GL}\_2(\bar F\_l)$ which has recently been proved by Khare and Wintenberger.


The third conjecture made by Ramanujan was the estimate $|\tau(p)|\leq 2p^{11/2}$; it was finally proved in the 70s by Deligne as a consequence of his proof of the Weil conjectures.


There is one conjecture which even Ramanujan did not make. It concerns the distribution of the numbers $\tau(p)/2p^{11/2}$ in the interval $[-1,1]$. The Sato-Tate conjecture asserts that these numbers are equidistributed with respect to the measure $(2/\pi)\sqrt{1-t^2}\,dt$, and this has finally been proved very recently by T. Barnet-Lamb, D. Geraghty, M. Harris and R. Taylor (see Taylor's homepage at Harvard).


