Ramanujan: The Second Century

Abstract

Srinivasa Ramanujan’s spectacular discoveries revealed surprising connections between apparently unrelated topics and provided food for thought for mathematicians of subsequent generations. This article describes how Ramanujan’s results and ideas will continue to influence research in the century following his centenary in areas such as mock theta functions, congruences for partition functions and coefficients of modular forms, q-hypergeometric identities, special functions, mathematical physics, and computer algebra.

This article appeared in The Hindu, India’s national newspaper, on December 22, 1991, on Ramanujan’s 104-th birth anniversary.