Mathematics scholar to discuss life of Ramanujan in Rowan talk

Mathematics scholar Bruce C. Berndt will discuss the life and works of famed Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan on Friday, April 16, at 3:30 p.m. in the Betty Long Rowan Lecture Hall in Rowan University's Rowan Hall.

Berndt's chat, which is free and open to the public, is the final lecture in this spring's 2010 Dean's Distinguished Lecture Series, presented by Rowan's College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Berndt is the Michio Suzuki Distinguished Research Professor of Mathematics. He has published over 200 articles and 10 books, the majority of which focus on the writings of Ramanujan. He specializes in Ramanujan's notebooks, analytic number theory, special functions, elliptic functions, q-series and continued fractions.

Berndt is contributions editor of The Ramanujan Journal. In 1996, he received an expository Steele Prize from the American Mathematical Society for his work editing Ramanujan's Notebooks.

Though he attended college for only one year, Ramanujan's mathematical discoveries, made mostly in isolation, have made him one of the 20^th century's most influential mathematicians. Most of his mathematical discoveries were recorded without proofs in notebooks.

Photographs depicting Ramanujan, his home, his school, his notebooks, and those people influential in his life will accompany Berndt's lecture.

Visit www.rowan.edu/colleges/las/events/event.cfm?id=15 for information about the 2010 Dean's Distinguished Lecture Series.