The Lost Notebook: Treasures Rediscovered
The remarkable story of Ramanujan's final mathematical discoveries
Learn about Ramanujan's Lost Notebook discovered in 1976, containing formulas he wrote on his deathbed that continue to yield new mathematical insights.
The Lost Notebook: Treasures Rediscovered
In the spring of 1976, the American mathematician George Andrews was visiting Trinity College, Cambridge, hunting through the papers of G. N. Watson for material on Ramanujan. Watson had spent much of his career working through Ramanujan's published notebooks. After his death in 1965, Watson's mathematical estate had been deposited at Trinity's Wren Library. Andrews asked to see the Watson papers, sat down in the reading room, and began to open boxes.
In one of them he found 87 unbound sheets of paper covered in a handwriting he recognized immediately. The sheets had never been published. They had apparently never been catalogued. They had been sitting in Watson's study for the better part of forty years, and after Watson's death they had travelled quietly to the Wren Library in an unmarked box. The handwriting was Ramanujan's. The formulas were dated to his last year of life, 1919 and 1920, in Kumbakonam, when he was already dying of what doctors now believe was hepatic amoebiasis. Andrews spent the afternoon reading. Within an hour he understood what he was holding. This was the manuscript the world had been hearing about for decades and had given up looking for. It was, as he would later call it, Ramanujan's Lost Notebook.
The discovery was immediately compared in the mathematical press to the finding of a lost Beethoven symphony. The comparison was not hyperbole. The manuscript contained roughly 600 formulas, most of them previously unknown, and many of them in Ramanujan's characteristic form of a bare statement with no proof. They belonged to the last year of a life that had produced, in roughly a decade of active work, a body of results that mathematics is still catching up to. The Lost Notebook was the final layer, and it turned out to contain the deepest results Ramanujan ever wrote down.