Böcker av Bruce C. Berndt

Its discovery has frequently been deemed the mathematical equivalent of finding Beethoven's tenth symphony. This fifth and final installment of the authors' examination of Ramanujan's lost notebook focuses on the mock theta functions first introduced in Ramanujan's famous Last Letter.

Its discovery has frequently been deemed the mathematical equivalent of finding Beethoven's tenth symphony.This volume is the fourth of five volumes that the authors plan to write on Ramanujan's lost notebook. In contrast to the first three books on Ramanujan's Lost Notebook, the fourth book does not focus on q-series.

"Ramanujan's lost notebook" contains considerable material on mock theta functions and so undoubtedly emanates from the last year of Ramanujan's life. It should be emphasized that the material on mock theta functions is perhaps Ramanujan's deepest work.

During the years 1903-1914, Ramanujan recorded many of his mathematical discoveries in notebooks without providing proofs. Part I, published in 1985, contains an account of Chapters 1-9 in the second notebook as well as a description of Ramanujan's quarterly reports. In this volume, we examine Chapters 10-15 in Ramanujan's second notebook.

In 1957, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay finally published a photostat edition of the notebooks, but no editing was undertaken. In 1977, Berndt began the task of editing Ramanujans notebooks: proofs are provided to theorems not yet proven in previous literature, and many results are so startling as to be unique.

Srinivasa Ramanujan is, arguably, the greatest mathematicianthat India has produced. He died very young, at the age of 32,leaving behind three notebooks containing almost 3000theorems, virtually all without proof. Hardy andothers strongly urged that notebooks be edited andpublished, and the result is this series of books.

The fifth and final volume to establish the results claimed by the great Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan in his "Notebooks" first published in 1957. Although each of the five volumes contains many deep results, the average depth in this volume is possibly greater than in the first four.