George Andrews 2017

Ramanujan and Computer Algebra: From the Movie to Mathematica

In the spring of last year, the motion picture, The Man Who Knew Infinity, was released and was shown in Little Hall on March 19, 2016 during the Alladi60 conference.  It is now available on DVD.  The movie tells the life story of the Indian genius, Ramanujan.  To remind everyone of the story, I hope to start with the trailer from the movie.  Then I shall provide some discussion of Ramanujan’s life and give a glimpse of his mathematics from the celebrated Lost Notebook.  This will lead naturally to a journey from Euler to Ramanujan to Schur to Alladi.  In contrast with my talk at Alladi 60, I wish to highlight how Mathematica could have led to a very direct approach to the Alladi-Schur theorem. We conclude with the question: Was it a good thing that neither Ramanujan nor Schur had access to a computer algebra package?