Ramanujan S Notebooks

Srinivasa Ramanujan is, arguably, the greatest mathematician that India has produced. His story is quite unusual: although he had no formal education inmathematics, he taught himself, and managed to produce many important new results. With the support of the English number theorist G. H. Hardy, Ramanujan received a scholarship to go to England and study mathematics. He died very young, at the age of 32, leaving behind three notebooks containing almost 3000 theorems, virtually all without proof. G. H. Hardy and others strongly urged that notebooks be edited and published, and the result is this series of books. This volume dealswith Chapters 1-9 of Book II; each theorem is either proved, or a reference to a proof is given.

In the library at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1976, George Andrews of Pennsylvania State University discovered a sheaf of pages in the handwriting of Srinivasa Ramanujan. Soon designated as "Ramanujan’s Lost Notebook," it contains considerable material on mock theta functions and undoubtedly dates from the last year of Ramanujan’s life. In this book, the notebook is presented with additional material and expert commentary.

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During the years 1903-1914, Ramanujan recorded many of his mathematical discoveries in notebooks without providing proofs. Although many of his results were already in the literature, more were not. Almost a decade after Ramanujan's death in 1920, G.N. Watson and B.M. Wilson began to edit his notebooks but never completed the task. A photostat edition, with no editing, was published by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay in 1957. This book is the second of four volumes devoted to the editing of Ramanujan's Notebooks. Part I, published in 1985, contains an account of Chapters 1-9 in the second notebook as well as a description of Ramanujan's quarterly reports. In this volume, we examine Chapters 10-15 in Ramanujan's second notebook. If a result is known, we provide references in the literature where proofs may be found; if a result is not known, we attempt to prove it. Not only are the results fascinating, but, for the most part, Ramanujan's methods remain a mystery. Much work still needs to be done. We hope readers will strive to discover Ramanujan's thoughts and further develop his beautiful ideas.

Srinivasa Ramanujan is, arguably, the greatest mathematician that India has produced. His story is quite unusual: although he had no formal education inmathematics, he taught himself, and managed to produce many important new results. With the support of the English number theorist G. H. Hardy, Ramanujan received a scholarship to go to England and study mathematics. He died very young, at the age of 32, leaving behind three notebooks containing almost 3000 theorems, virtually all without proof. G. H. Hardy and others strongly urged that notebooks be edited and published, and the result is this series of books. This volume dealswith Chapters 1-9 of Book II; each theorem is either proved, or a reference to a proof is given.

In the spring of 1976, George Andrews of Pennsylvania State University visited the library at Trinity College, Cambridge, to examine the papers of the late G.N. Watson. Among these papers, Andrews discovered a sheaf of 138 pages in the handwriting of Srinivasa Ramanujan. This manuscript was soon designated "Ramanujan's lost notebook." The "lost notebook" contains considerable material on mock theta functions and so undoubtedly emanates from the last year of Ramanujan's life. It should be emphasized that the material on mock theta functions is perhaps Ramanujan's deepest work.

The fifth and final volume to establish the results claimed by the great Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan in his "Notebooks" first published in 1957. Although each of the five volumes contains many deep results, the average depth in this volume is possibly greater than in the first four. There are several results on continued fractions - a subject that Ramanujan loved very much. It is the authors wish that this and previous volumes will serve as springboards for further investigations by mathematicians intrigued by Ramanujans remarkable ideas.