RAMUNAJAN.

RAMUNAJAN. Forty years ago the autobiography of the mathematician G. H. Hardy was something of a best seller. The main reason, I think, was his moving account of the life and death of his young protege, Srinivasa Ramanujan. Ramanujan was a self-taught young man in India, not even a college graduate, who gathered his courage to submit some of his results to three leading English mathematicians. Two ignored him. The third was Hardy, who recognized his genius, brought him to England and collaborated with him. Ramanujan died of tuberculosis at 32 in 1920. This article describes how two University of Wisconsin mathematicians have solved two of the six “Millenium problems”, targeted for solution in this century. The two problems relate to a class of functions described by Ramanujan over eighty years ago, just before he died. The article is wonderful journalism, dramatic and giving an idea of how something that can be stated simply can be solved by creative activity of extraordinary complexity. The article gives the example: how many ways can a given number be expressed as a sum of two squares? The blackboard in the picture behind the two mathematicians shows one of the functions, which have the wonderful name of “mock theta functions.”