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.
Originally published in 1927, this book presents the collected papers of the renowned Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920), with editorial contributions from G. H. Hardy (1877-1947). Detailed notes are incorporated throughout and appendices are also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the works of Ramanujan and the history of mathematics.
A young mathematical genius from India searches for the secrets hidden inside numbers — and for someone who understands him — in this gorgeous picture-book biography. A mango . . . is just one thing. But if I chop it in two, then chop the half in two, and keep on chopping, I get more and more bits, on and on, endlessly, to an infinity I could never ever reach. In 1887 in India, a boy named Ramanujan is born with a passion for numbers. He sees numbers in the squares of light pricking his thatched roof and in the beasts dancing on the temple tower. He writes mathematics with his finger in the sand, across the pages of his notebooks, and with chalk on the temple floor. “What is small?” he wonders. “What is big?” Head in the clouds, Ramanujan struggles in school — but his mother knows that her son and his ideas have a purpose. As he grows up, Ramanujan reinvents much of modern mathematics, but where in the world could he find someone to understand what he has conceived? Author Amy Alznauer gently introduces young readers to math concepts while Daniel Miyares’s illustrations bring the wonder of Ramanujan’s world to life in the inspiring real-life story of a boy who changed mathematics and science forever. Back matter includes a bibliography and an author’s note recounting more of Ramanujan’s life and accomplishments, as well as the author’s father’s remarkable discovery of Ramanujan’s Lost Notebook.
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.
A biography of the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. The book gives a detailed account of his upbringing in India, his mathematical achievements, and his mathematical collaboration with English mathematician G. H. Hardy. The book also reviews the life of Hardy and the academic culture of Cambridge University during the early twentieth century.
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.
This book contains essays on Ramanujan and his work that were written especially for this volume. It also includes important survey articles in areas influenced by Ramanujan's mathematics. Most of the articles in the book are nontechnical, but even those that are more technical contain substantial sections that will engage the general reader. The book opens with the only four existing photographs of Ramanujan, presenting historical accounts of them and information about other people in the photos. This section includes an account of a cryptic family history written by his younger brother, S. Lakshmi Narasimhan. Following are articles on Ramanujan's illness by R. A. Rankin, the British physician D. A. B. Young, and Nobel laureate S. Chandrasekhar. They present a study of his symptoms, a convincing diagnosis of the cause of his death, and a thorough exposition of Ramanujan's life as a patient in English sanitariums and nursing homes. Following this are biographies of S. Janaki (Mrs. Ramanujan) and S. Narayana Iyer, Chief Accountant of the Madras Port Trust Office, who first communicated Ramanujan's work to the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society. The last half of the book begins with a section on ``Ramanujan's Manuscripts and Notebooks''. Included is an important article by G. E. Andrews on Ramanujan's lost notebook. The final two sections feature both nontechnical articles, such as Jonathan and Peter Borwein's ``Ramanujan and pi'', and more technical articles by Freeman Dyson, Atle Selberg, Richard Askey, and G. N. Watson. This volume complements the book Ramanujan: Letters and Commentary, Volume 9, in the AMS series, History of Mathematics. For more on Ramanujan, see these AMS publications Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work, Volume 136.H, and Collected Papers of Srinivasa Ramanujan, Volume 159.H, in the AMS Chelsea Publishing series.
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.
