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Professor Emeritus

Bruce C. Berndt

CAS Professor Emeritus of Mathematics

Professor Berndt is an analytic number theorist. Beginning in 1974, he began the task of finding proofs for all of the claims made in notebooks by Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920), generally regarded as India’s greatest mathematician. The earlier notebooks arise from approximately the years 1904–1914, while the “lost notebook” is from the last year of Ramanujan’s short life. The three earlier notebooks were published in photocopy form by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay in 1957. Over a period of more than 20 years, with the help of several of his doctoral students, Professor Berndt completed the task of finding proofs for all of the approximately 3000–4000 claims in the earlier notebooks in the late 1990s. This work was published in Ramanujan’s Notebooks, Parts I-V (Springer), for which Berndt received the Steele Prize from the American Mathematical Society in 1996. The “lost notebook” was found in the library at Trinity College, Cambridge, in March 1976 by Professor George Andrews of Pennsylvania State University. (At the invitation of Professor G. H. Hardy, Ramanujan did research at Cambridge in the years 1914–1919.) Beginning in the mid-1990s, Berndt began attempting to find proofs of the claims made by Ramanujan in his “lost notebook” and other unpublished partial manuscripts and fragments found in the libraries at both Cambridge and Oxford. Aided by a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the Sloan Foundation, and by several of his graduate students, Berndt, along with co-author George Andrews, completed the task of proving and editing all of the claims made by Ramanujan in his “lost notebook.” Their fifth and final volume on the “lost notebook” was published in September 2018.

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