Ramanujan's Series for 1/π: A Survey

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Notes on contributors

Nayandeep Deka Baruah

NAYANDEEP DEKA BARUAH is Reader of Mathematical Sciences at Tezpur University, Assam, India. He received his Ph.D. degree from this university in 2001. He was a recipient of an ISCA Young Scientist Award in 2004 and a BOYSCAST Fellowship in 2005–06 from the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, under which he spent the year March 2006-March 2007 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working with Professor Berndt. He has been a fan of π since the first year of his B.Sc. To learn more about π, he began reading about Ramanujan and his mathematics and became a huge fan of Ramanujan! He still loves to recite the first 2000 digits of π from memory in his leisure time.

Bruce C. Berndt

BRUCE C. BERNDT is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 1977 he has devoted almost all of his research energy toward finding proofs for the claims made by Ramanujan in his (earlier) notebooks and lost notebook. Aiding him in this endeavor have been many of his 25 former and 6 current doctoral students, as well as several outstanding postdoctoral visitors. So far, he has published ten books on Ramanujan's work. Most recently, he and George Andrews have published their second of approximately four volumes on Ramanujan's lost notebook.

Heng Huat Chan

HENG HUAT CHAN is currently Professor of Mathematics at the National University of Singapore. He received his Ph.D. in 1995 under the supervision of Professor B. C. Berndt (the second author of this paper) and spent nine months at the Institute for Advanced Study after his graduation. He then took up a one-year visiting position at the National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan. While in Taiwan, he attempted without success to design a graduate course based on the book “Pi and the AGM” by J. M. Borwein and P. B. Borwein. However, it was during this period that he began his research on “Ramanujan-type series for 1/π.” Since then, he has published several papers on this topic with various mathematicians.