MAA Polya Lecturer Invitation

The Lost Notebook of Ramanujan - George Andrews

Abstract:

   In 1976 quite by accident, I stumbled across a collection of about 100 sheets of mathematics in Ramanujan's handwriting; they were stored in a box in the Trinity College Library in Cambridge. I titled this collection "Ramanujan's Lost Notebook" to distinguish it from the famous notebooks that he had prepared earlier in his life.  On and off for the past 32 years, I have studied these wild and confusing pages.  Some of the weirder results have yielded entirely new lines of research.  I will try to provide a gentle account of where these efforts have led.  The result that most frightened me (I tried to ignore it for 26 years) will conclude the presentation.