## Tuesday, November 10, 2015

### Ramanujan Links

1. Ramanujan and elliptic curves
A box of manuscripts and three notebooks. That's all that's left of the work of Srinivasa Ramanujan, an Indian mathematician who lived his remarkable but short life around the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet, that small stash of mathematical legacy still yields surprises. Two mathematicians of Emory University, Ken Ono and Sarah Trebat-Leder, have recently made a fascinating discovery within its yellowed pages. It shows that Ramanujan was further ahead of his time than anyone had expected, and provides a beautiful link between several milestones in the history of mathematics.

2. Ramanujan and the disappearing number
This is exactly the answer Ramanujan gave in his letter to Hardy. This surprising result showed Hardy that Ramanujan had managed to derive the Riemann zeta function and its functional equation correctly himself. In fact Ramanujan, almost entirely self-taught, had reinvented many other areas of Western mathematics, on his own. He was a mathematical genius with an intuitive connection to mathematics. And Hardy displayed his own mathematical genius by seeing through Ramanujan's idiosyncratic notations to uncover the genius beneath.