George Andrews 2018

Ramanujan’s Lost Notebook in Five Volumes__Reflections.

Abstract: Bruce Berndt and I have recently completed the fifth and final volume on Ramanujan’s Lost Notebook.  All of Ramanujan’s assertions in the Lost Notebook (with perhaps one of two exceptions) have been proved or, in very rare instances, refuted or corrected. Among these hundreds of formulas there are a number that stand out.  For example, the recent explosion of results on mock theta functions and mock modular forms has it origin in the Lost Notebook.  The “sums-of-tails” phenomenon also arose from the Lost Notebook. This talk will be a personal account of highlights from this project and questions, yet to be answered, that arose from this decades long effort.