🔗 Ramanujan's Lost Notebook

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 India 🔗 India/Tamil Nadu

Ramanujan's lost notebook is the manuscript in which the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan recorded the mathematical discoveries of the last year (1919–1920) of his life. Its whereabouts were unknown to all but a few mathematicians until it was rediscovered by George Andrews in 1976, in a box of effects of G. N. Watson stored at the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge. The "notebook" is not a book, but consists of loose and unordered sheets of paper described as "more than one hundred pages written on 138 sides in Ramanujan's distinctive handwriting. The sheets contained over six hundred mathematical formulas listed consecutively without proofs."

George Andrews and Bruce C. Berndt (2005, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2018) have published several books in which they give proofs for Ramanujan's formulas included in the notebook. Berndt says of the notebook's discovery: "The discovery of this 'Lost Notebook' caused roughly as much stir in the mathematical world as the discovery of Beethoven’s tenth symphony would cause in the musical world."