Srinivasa Ramanujan: in celebration of the centenary of his election as FRS

Bruce Berndt has been on the mathematics faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1967. While on sabbatical leave at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1974, he became keenly interested in the work of Ramanujan, primarily through two papers by Emil Grosswald. In 1977, Berndt began to edit the earlier notebooks of Srinivasa Ramanujan. Earlier notes by G.N. Watson and B.M. Wilson from their attempts in the late 1920's and early 1930's to edit the notebooks were very helpful. By "editing," we mean providing proofs for the over 3300 formulas and claims in these notebooks, which arise from approximately the period 1904--1914. This task was completed in 1998 with the fifth volume published by Springer. Beginning in the late 1990's, Berndt and George Andrews began "editing" Ramanujan's lost notebook. Their fifth and final volume on the lost notebook was published by Springer earlier this year. Berndt and R.A. Rankin have also published two volumes with the American Mathematical Society on Ramanujan's correspondence and essays about his work.

George E. Andrews was born in Salem, Oregon. He received his B.S. and M.A. degrees from Oregon State University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Andrews is Evan Pugh University Professor in Mathematics at the Pennsylvania State University. An expert on q-series, he has written and published more than 300 papers and has just completed (jointly with Bruce Berndt) the fifth and final volume explicating Ramanujan's Lost Notebook. Andrews was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997, and to the National Academy of Sciences (USA) in 2003. He was awarded an honorary professorship at Nankai University in 2008. In 2009 he became a SIAM Fellow. He holds honorary degrees from Parma, Florida, Waterloo, Illinois and SASTRA University (India). Andrews served as President of the American Mathematical Society from February 1, 2009 to January 31, 2011, and became a Fellow of the AMS in 2012

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Trevor D.Wooley gained his PhD from Imperial College in 1990, He was faculty member of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1991 - 2007 (serving as Chair 2002-2005), and has been based at the University of Bristol from 2007 - present. His research is centred on the Hardy-Littlewood (circle) method, a method based on the use of Fourier series that delivers asymptotic formulae for counting functions associated with arithmetic problems. In the 21st Century, this method has become immersed in a turbulent mix of ideas on the interface of Diophantine equations and inequalities, arithmetic geometry, harmonic analysis and ergodic theory, and arithmetic combinatorics. Wooley has been awarded the Salem Prize (1998), Frohlich Prize (2012), elected FRS (2007) and FAMS (2012). He was a 45-minute speaker at ICM in Beijing (2002) and Seoul (2014).

P. P. Vaidyanathan is the Kiyo and Eiko Tomiyasu Professor of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He received the B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees from the University of Calcutta, India, and the Ph.D degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored over 500 papers and four books in the signal processing area, and has received prizes for excellence in teaching at Caltech multiple times. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, recipient of the F. E. Terman Award of the American Society for Engineering Education, and past distinguished lecturer for the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He has received the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Technical Achievement Award (2002), Education Award (2012), and Society Award (2016), and the 2016 IEEE Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award (a Technical Field award) for ``fundamental contributions to digital signal processing

Professor Alex Lubotzky is the Weil Professor of Mathematics at the Einstein Institute of the Hebrew University. He has authored 4 books and over 130 research papers. His name appears on the ISI list of the most cited scientists in the world. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford, Columbia, the University of Chicago, Yale, NYU, ETH and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Lubotzky received a number of Israeli and international prizes, including the Israel prize 2018. He is an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Israel Academy of Science. In 2006 he received an honorary degree from the University of Chicago for his contributions to modern mathematics. From 1996 - 1999 he served as a member of the Israeli Knesset.

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W. Li is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on automorphic forms, number theory, and their applications to combinatorics. Her thesis work on the newform theory was cited in Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. She applied results in automorphic forms and number theory to construct efficient communication networks called Ramanujan graphs and Ramanujan complexes. Her work on the arithmetic of modular forms for noncongruence subgroups has revitalized the field. Li earned a B.S. degree at National Taiwan University and a Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to Penn State, she held positions at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and Harvard University. She was the Director of Taiwan's National Center for Theoretical Sciences 2009-2014. She received the 2010 Chern Prize in Mathematics and was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2013.

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Sujatha Ramdorai is an Indian Mathematician who was at the Tata Institute of fundamental Research, Bombay before moving to University of British Columbia in 2011 where she currently holds a Canada Research Chair. She works in Algebra and Number Theory and was the recipient of the ICTP Ramanujan Prize in 2006. She is also passionate about making Math Education accessible to all and established the Ramanujan Math Park in India. She has also worked on policy issues related to education, research and international collaborations.

Amanda Folsom is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Amherst College. She has also held positions at Yale University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has been a visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Her BA is from the University of Chicago, and her PhD from UCLA, both in mathematics. Folsom's research interests in number theory include modular forms, harmonic Maass forms and mock modular forms, Ramanujan's mock theta functions, Jacobi forms, quantum modular forms, modular units, q-series, and applications to combinatorics and the theory of partitions. She has authored or co-authored ~45 scholarly articles, as well as one book, titled “Harmonic Maass forms and mock modular forms: theory and applications.” Folsom is currently grateful for the support of a National Science Foundation Career Grant for research and mentoring, and is a 2018-19 Simons Foundation Fellow in Mathematics.

Soundararajan is Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University. His research interests are in number theory, analysis, probability, and combinatorics.

Jeffrey Harvey is the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Service Professor and a member of the Physics Department and the Enrico Fermi Institute of the University of Chicago. He received undergraduate degrees in mathematics and physics from the University of Minnesota, a Ph.D from Caltech in 1981 and was a postdoc and faculty member at Princeton University before moving to the University of Chicago in 1989. His research interests and accomplishments cover a broad spectrum of topics in particle theory, cosmology, mathematical physics, and string theory. He was chair of the University of Chicago physics department from 2001-2004. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Ono is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Mathematics at Emory University and Vice President of the American Mathematical Society. His contributions include several monographs and more than 160 research and popular articles in number theory, combinatorics and algebra. He earned his Ph.D. from UCLA and has received many awards for his research, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Packard Fellowship and a Sloan Research Fellowship. He was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE) by Bill Clinton in 2000 and was named a Distinguished Teaching Scholar by the National Science Foundation in 2005. He is also a member of the US National Committee for Mathematics and the National Academy of Sciences. He was also an Associate Producer of the film “The Man Who Knew Infinity”, the Hollywood biopic about Srinivasa Ramanujan which starred Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel.

Miranda Cheng is a researcher active in the field of string theory, focusing on the interplay between mathematics and string theory. In recent years, her main research interest is moonshine phenomenon. She received her PhD in theoretical physics in 2008, under the supervision of Erik Verline in the University of Amsterdam. After her postdoc positions in the physics and math departments of Harvard University, she joined CNRS in 2012, affiliated with L'institut de mathématiques de Jussieu in Paris. Since 2014 she is back in Amsterdam as a faculty member, affiliated with the Korteweg-de Vries Institute of Mathematics and with the Institute of Physics.