Pictures from the event are available here.
Dr. Bruce Berndt
"The Life and Notebooks of India's Greatest Mathematician,
Srinivasa Ramanujan"
Tuesday, May 7, 2002
7:30 p.m.
Century Room, Millennium Student Center
sponsored by The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Ramanujan was born in southern India in 1887 and died in 1920 at the age
of 32. He attended college for one year, having to leave, because he was
devoting all of his time to mathematics and could not pass his other
examinations. In 1913, he wrote the great English mathematician G. H. Hardy
about his discoveries. Hardy invited him to come to Cambridge where he
stayed for five years, with the last two years in declining health.
Ramanujan returned to India in 1919 and died one year later. Even though
his mathematical discoveries were mostly made in isolation, he became one
of the 20th century's most influential mathematicians.
Professor Berndt will highlight Ramanujan's life, using photographs of
Ramanujan and his home, high school, college, books, passport, and other
personal items. Since most of Ramanujan's mathematical discoveries were
recorded without proofs in notebooks, Berndt will provide a description,
history, and brief overview about their content.
The Presenter:
Dr. Bruce Berndt, professor at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a world-renowned authority on number theory.
He has published more than 150 articles on Dirichlet Series, the Zeta Function,
Reciprocity Theory for Dedekind Sums, and other topics in analytic number
theory. He is an authority on Ramanujan and he edited Ramanujan's notebooks
comprised of five volumes published by Springer-Verlag from 1985 to 1998.
Berndt has been a professor of mathematics at Urbana-Champaign since 1975
and has advised more than twenty doctoral students. He was awarded the
Mathematical Association of America's Allendorfer Award in 1979 and Ford
Award in 1989 and 1994, the Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition by the
American Mathematical Society in 1996 and was a Guggenheim Fellow from 1998
through 1999. Berndt has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study,
and a visiting Professor at numerous foreign universities.
A reception will follow the lecture
Admission is free, but reservations are requested.
Please call (314) 516-5789.
Parking is available in lot E.
Special thanks to Robert Spencer (B.A. Mathematics, '72)
whose gift has made this lecture series possible.