YourHit Parade: The Top TenMost Fascinating Formulas in Ramanujan’s Lost Notebook

A t 7:30 on a Saturday evening in March 1956, the first author sat down in an easy chair in the living room of his parents’ farm home ten miles east of Salem, Oregon, and turned the TV channel knob to NBC’s Your Hit Parade to find out the Top Seven Songs of the week, as determined by a national “survey” and sheet music sales. Little did this teenager know that almost exactly twenty years later, he would be at Trinity College, Cambridge, to discover one of the biggest “hits” in mathematical history, Ramanujan’s Lost Notebook. Meanwhile, at that same hour on that same Saturday night in Stevensville, Michigan, but at 9:30, the second author sat down in an overstuffed chair in front of the TV in his parents’ farm home anxiously waiting to learn the identities of the Top Seven Songs, sung by Your Hit Parade singers, Russell Arms, Dorothy Collins (his favorite singer), Snooky Lanson, and Gisele MacKenzie. About twenty years later, that author’s life would begin to be consumed by Ramanujan’s mathematics, but more important than Ramanujan to him this evening was how long his parents would allow him to stay up to watch Saturday night wrestling after Your Hit Parade ended.