This book offers a unique account on the life and works of Srinivasa Ramanujan—often hailed as the greatest “natural” mathematical genius. Sharing valuable insights into the many stages of Ramanujan’s life, this book provides glimpses into his prolific research on highly composite numbers, partitions, continued fractions, mock theta functions, arithmetic, and hypergeometric functions which led the author to discover a new summation theorem. It also includes the list of Ramanujan’s collected papers, letters and other material present at the Wren Library, Trinity College in Cambridge, UK. This book is a valuable resource for all readers interested in Ramanujan’s life, work and indelible contributions to mathematics.
The letters that Ramanujan wrote to G. H. Hardy on January 16 and February 27, 1913, are two of the most famous letters in the history of mathematics. These and other letters introduced Ramanujan and his remarkable theorems to the world and stimulated much research, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. This book brings together many letters to, from, and about Ramanujan. The letters came from the National Archives in Delhi, the Archives in the State of Tamil Nadu, and a variety of other sources. Helping to orient the reader is the extensive commentary, both mathematical and cultural, by Berndt and Rankin; in particular, they discuss in detail the history, up to the present day, of each mathematical result in the letters. Containing many letters that have never been published before, this book will appeal to those interested in Ramanujan's mathematics as well as those wanting to learn more about the personal side of his life. Ramanujan: Letters and Commentary was selected for the CHOICE list of Outstanding Academic Books for 1996.
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.
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.
Upon Ramanujans death in 1920, G. H. Hardy strongly urged that Ramanujans notebooks be published and edited. In 1957, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay finally published a photostat edition of the notebooks, but no editing was undertaken. In 1977, Berndt began the task of editing Ramanujans notebooks: proofs are provided to theorems not yet proven in previous literature, and many results are so startling as to be unique.
Srinivasa Ramanujan's achievements in research made him perhaps the greatest Indian mathematician of modern times. By the time he was 12 years old he had worked through a copy of Loney's Trigonometry. At the age of 16 he verified over 6,000 formulae in Carr's Synopsis of Pure Mathematics. By the time he was married at 21 he had already obtained several results in the areas of elliptic integrals, hypergeometric series and divergent series. In 1918 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of Trinity College, but died shortly thereafter.
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.
This book offers a unique account on the life and works of Srinivasa Ramanujan—often hailed as the greatest “natural” mathematical genius. Sharing valuable insights into the many stages of Ramanujan’s life, this book provides glimpses into his prolific research on highly composite numbers, partitions, continued fractions, mock theta functions, arithmetic, and hypergeometric functions which led the author to discover a new summation theorem. It also includes the list of Ramanujan’s collected papers, letters and other material present at the Wren Library, Trinity College in Cambridge, UK. This book is a valuable resource for all readers interested in Ramanujan’s life, work and indelible contributions to mathematics.
The letters that Ramanujan wrote to G. H. Hardy on January 16 and February 27, 1913, are two of the most famous letters in the history of mathematics. These and other letters introduced Ramanujan and his remarkable theorems to the world and stimulated much research, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. This book brings together many letters to, from, and about Ramanujan. The letters came from the National Archives in Delhi, the Archives in the State of Tamil Nadu, and a variety of other sources. Helping to orient the reader is the extensive commentary, both mathematical and cultural, by Berndt and Rankin; in particular, they discuss in detail the history, up to the present day, of each mathematical result in the letters. Containing many letters that have never been published before, this book will appeal to those interested in Ramanujan's mathematics as well as those wanting to learn more about the personal side of his life. Ramanujan: Letters and Commentary was selected for the CHOICE list of Outstanding Academic Books for 1996.
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