Risc Colloquium

Generally regarded as India's greatest mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in the southern Indian town of Kumbakonam on December 22, 1887 and died in Madras at the age of 32 in 1920. Before going to England in 1914 at the invitation of G. H. Hardy, Ramanujan recorded most of his mathematical discoveries without proofs in notebooks. The speaker devoted over 20 years to the editing of these notebooks; his goal was to provide proofs for all those claims of Ramanujan for which proofs had not been given in the literature. In this lecture, we give a brief history of Ramanujan's life, a history of the notebooks, a general description of the subjects found in the notebooks, and examples of some of the more interesting formulas found in the notebooks.

Note by Peter Paule: The talk is directed to a general mathematical audience; students are particularly welcome! - Professor Berndt is an internationally renowned analytic number theorist. He is known world-wide as a leading Ramanujan expert. - The recent film "The Man Who Knew Infinity" ("Die Poesie des Unendlichen") presented a much-noticed portrait of the Indian genius; actors: Jeremy Irons, Dev Patel ("Slumdog Millionaire").