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For such a legendary mathematician, it does beg the question of why his old notes were not pored over before.

• jeremyjh 11y ago
  I think they have been. My understanding is they have been inferring the thought processes that must have laid behind the formulas written in his notebook, to find the more general theory. So they had to put quite a bit of work into this themselves.
• wbhart 11y ago
  They certainly were. Bruce Berndt is one example of a mathematician who has spent an entire career proving the results found in Ramanujan's notebooks. He has written a number of very thick books showing methods of proof for all his results. Notice that Ono says that only a few people knew about this stuff. Another way of saying the same thing (the more usual way in my opinion) is that "this was already known by the experts".
• chris_wot 11y ago
  They have been. The issue, as I understand it, is that when Ramanujan was doing mathematics paper was relatively expensive so he would do all his working on a slate, get to the end of the slate, flip it over, do more working, then flip over the slate and wipe off the working. When he came to his conclusion he wrote it in his notebook, with no working! I believe in this regard he was unlike Euler, who used to go down wrong paths but explain why he was doing something and why he backed out to go down the right path (apparently Gauss looked down on this, but Gauss wasn't blind and doing it all in his head).
• jordigh 11y ago
  Good mathematicians never beg any questions!