In the spring of 1976, George Andrews of Pennsylvania State University visited the library at Trinity College, Cambridge, to examine the papers of the late G.N. Watson. Among these papers, Andrews discovered a sheaf of 138 pages in the handwriting of Srinivasa Ramanujan. This manuscript was soon designated, "Ramanujan's lost notebook." Its discovery has frequently been deemed the mathematical equivalent of finding Beethoven's tenth symphony.
The "lost notebook" contains considerable material on mock theta functions and so undoubtedly emanates from the last year of Ramanujan's life. It should be emphasized that the material on mock theta functions is perhaps Ramanujan's deepest work. Mathematicians are probably several decades away from a complete understanding of those functions. More than half of the material in the book is on q-series, including mock theta functions; the remaining part deals with theta function identities, modular equations, incomplete elliptic integrals ofthe first kind and other integrals of theta functions, Eisenstein series, particular values of theta functions, the Rogers-Ramanujan continued fraction, other q-continued fractions, other integrals, and parts of Hecke's theory of modular forms.
This volume is the first of approximately four volumes devoted to providing statements, proofs, and discussions of all the claims made by Srinivasa Ramanujan in his lost notebook and all his other manuscripts and letters published with the lost notebook. In addition to the lost notebook, this publication contains copies of unpublished manuscripts in the Oxford library, in particular, his famous unpublished manuscript on the partition and tau-functions; fragments of both published and unpublished papers; miscellaneous sheets; and Ramanujan's letters to G. H. Hardy, written from nursing homes during Ramanujan's final two years in England. This volume contains accounts of 442 entries (counting multiplicities) made by Ramanujan in the aforementioned publication. The present authors have organized these claims into eighteen chapters, containing anywhere from two entries in Chapter 13 to sixty-one entries in Chapter 17.
Most of the results contained in Ramanujan's Lost Notebook fall under the purview of q-series. These include mock theta functions, theta functions, partial theta function expansions, false theta functions, identities connected with the Rogers-Fine identity, several results in the theory of partitions, Eisenstein series, modular equations, the Rogers-Ramanujan continued fraction, other q-continued fractions, asymptotic expansions of q-series and q-continued fractions, integrals of theta functions, integrals of q-products, and incomplete elliptic integrals. Other continued fractions, other integrals, infinite series identities, Dirichlet series, approximations, arithmetic functions, numerical calculations, diophantine equations, and elementary mathematics are some of the further topics examined by Ramanujan in his lost notebook.
