Srinivasa Ramanujan · Mathematics
Ramanujan’s final gift - the mock theta functions of his last letter to Hardy in 1920, understood only in the twenty-first century through Zwegers’s work of 2002 - together with his death at thirty-two and the mathematics, and physics, that his intuition is still generating.
You learned that in his last letter (1920) Ramanujan described mysterious ‘mock theta functions’ that no one understood until Zwegers in 2002 placed them within modular-forms theory, and that he died at thirty-two with his mathematics still unfolding. Explain why this final idea was so far ahead of its tim…
Leads to Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.