Chapter 12 of Ramanujan's second notebook: Continued fractions (Q1073989)

Ramanujan was probably the greatest master of formal continued fractions. Hardy wrote that he felt Ramanujan was at his best in the theory of partitions and the allied parts of the theories of elliptic functions and continued fractions. When one looks at Ramanujan's published papers there is only one that contains a continued fraction, and that had been obtained twenty-five years before by L. J. Rogers. There are also three problems containing five continued fractions that were published in the J. Indian Math. Soc. That is a small amount of material to base the above claims on. Of course, there is a lot more. The letters Ramanujan wrote to Hardy contain many more continued fractions than Ramanujan published. The present paper contains 49 entries, most dealing with continued fractions, and many have interesting corollaries. Ramanujan found the Euler and the Gauß continued fractions for ratios of contiguous \({}_ 2F_ 1's\), and found continued fractions for quotients of gamma functions that had not been found by others. There is one marvelous one that Watson proved in 1935 (Entry 40) that still amazes me. I do not think the right proof has been found yet. There are also general results on continued fractions, such as the recurrence relations given in Entry 17. There is enough in this chapter to claim that Ramanujan was one of the few who really understood the formal theory of continued fractions, and this chapter does not contain any of Ramanujan's work on continued fractions that are related to partitions. As Watson showed, Entry 40 can be extended to this setting. The same is true for many other identities in this chapter. Heine started this with an extension of Gauß's continued fraction. Ramanujan's work is scattered in many places, in other chapters in this Notebook, in the ''Lost Notebook'', and, if I can extrapolate from what we know about what Ramanujan knew, and what we have of his work, there were other manuscripts with further results on continued fractions. The present paper was started in the early 1930's by B. M. Wilson, and completed as part of the labor of love that Berndt has done for almost a decade.