Series Title:
"Unearthing the visions of a master: The story and legacy of Ramanujan’s mock theta functions"

Lectures:
4/8 Thursday @ 4:15 - 5:15 pm in MS 6627
4/9 Friday @ 3:00 - 4:00 pm in MS 6627

Abstract:
The legend of Ramanujan is one of the most romantic stories in the modern history of mathematics. It is the story of an untrained mathematician, from south India, who brilliantly discovered tantalizing examples of phenomena well before their time. However, one final problem remained: the enigma of the functions which Ramanujan discovered on his death bed. Here we tell the story of Ramanujan’s “mock theta functions.” These functions are examples of “harmonic Maass forms,” and recent work on these forms have shed light on many topics: partitions, elliptic curves, characters of affine super Lie algebras, Borcherds products and Donaldson invariants. In these lectures the speaker will tell the story of these functions, and give examples of the roles that they play in these areas.