Publisher's Synopsis
In June 2009, a conference in number theory was held on the beautiful campus of Infosys in Bangalore. The impetus for organizing this meeting was to recognize and commemorate K. Venkatachaliengar, an outstanding, well-known mathematician, who taught primarily at universities in Bangalore and Mysore for most of his career. He was born on 8 December, 1908, and so the meeting marked the centenary of Venkatachaliengar's birth. In the last several decades of his long life of 95 years, KV, as he was affectionately known to most of his friends, had become keenly interested in the life and work of India's greatest mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and so it was natural for Ramanujan's first loves of theta functions, partitions, and q-series to be the focus of the conference. Accordingly, over 50 mathematicians gathered for the presentation of 32 lectures in memory of both Ramanujan and KV. This volume comprises 13 papers by mathematicians who lectured at the meeting. In addition, three papers on the life and work of KV, along with a complete list of his publications, are offered.
