Ramanujan's lost notebook
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Srinivasa Ramanujan's lost notebook is the manuscript in which Ramanujan, a widely admired Indian mathematician from Cambridge University, recorded the mathematical discoveries of the last year of his life. It was rediscovered by George Andrews in 1976, in a box of effects of G. N. Watson stored at the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge. The notebook contains more than 600 of Ramanujan's formulas.
Bruce Berndt, a mathematician at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, collaborated with George Andrews on several volumes of books in which the two mathematicians published the proofs for Ramanujan's formulas included in the notebook. Berndt says of the notebooks' discovery: "The discovery of this 'Lost Notebook' caused roughly as much stir in the mathematical world as the discovery of Beethoven’s tenth symphony would cause in the musical world."[1]
[edit] History
After Ramanujan died on April 26, 1920, at the age of 32, his widow gave his notebooks to the University of Madras. On August 30, 1923, the registrar Francis Drewsbury sent much of this material to G. H. Hardy, probably including the lost notebook. Some time between 1934 and 1947 Hardy passed the notebook on to G. N. Watson. After Watson's death in 1965, R. A. Rankin examined Watson's papers (which were a complete mess, apparently due to be incinerated in a few days) and found Ramanujan's notebook, which he sent to Trinity College library on December 26, 1968. George Andrews found the lost notebook in the spring of 1976 while on a visit to Trinity College, and it was published on December 22, 1987 by Narosa publishing house.
[edit] References
- Andrews, George E. (1979). "An introduction to Ramanujan's "lost" notebook". American Math Monthly 86 (2): 89–108.
- Andrews, George E. (2005). Ramanujan's Lost Notebook: Part I. Springer-Verlag New York, LLC. ISBN 0-387-25529-X.
- Ramanujan, Srinivasa (1988). The lost notebook and other unpublished papers. Springer-Verlag, Berlin; Narosa Publishing House, New Delhi. ISBN 3-540-18726-X.
