The legend of Ramanujan is one of the most romantic stories in the modern history of mathematics. It is the story of an untrained mathematician, from south India, who brilliantly discovered tantalizing examples of phenomena well before their time. Indeed, the legacy of Ramanujan's work (as a whole) is well documented and includes direct connections to some of the deepest results in modern number theory such as the proof of the Weil Conjectures and the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. However, one final problem remained, the enigma of the functions which Ramanujan discovered on his death bed. Here we tell the story of Ramanujan and this final mystery and its implications in modern mathematics
Penn Undergraduate Mathematics Colloquium
Thursday, January 29, 2009 - 3:00pm
Ken Ono
University of Wisconsin