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Thursday, January 15, 2009 - 1:00pm

George Andrews

Pennsylvania State University

Location

Drexel University

LeBow Engineering Center, Room 240

Refreshments will be served at 12:45 pm in LeBow 240

In 1976 quite by accident, I stumbled across a collection of about 100 sheets of mathematics in Ramanujan's handwriting; they were stored in a box in the Trinity College Library in Cambridge. I titled this collection "Ramanujan's Lost Notebook" to distinguish it from the famous notebooks that he had prepared earlier in his life. On and off for the past 32 years, I have studied these wild and confusing pages. Some of the weirder results have yielded entirely new lines of discovery. Sometimes, if you pay close attention, you can gain some possible insights about the searches that Ramanujan undertook and the questions he must have asked himself. Even if such speculations may be far from Ramanujan's actual thinking, they are nonetheless valuable exercises to undertake. Some of these flights of fancy will form the topics in this talk.