An idea on some of Ramanujan's continued fraction identities (Q2269019)

The author presents her idea on how Ramanujan found some of his beautiful continued fraction identities. Or more to the point: why he chose the ones he wrote down among all possible identities. The purpose of this paper is to present a possible alternative, namely that his continued fraction identities are grouped according to the methods used to derive them. The most important group is probably the continued fraction identities which arise from solutions of three term recurrence relations \[ F_n = b_nF_{n+1} + a_{n+1}F_{n+2}\quad\text{for}\;n = 0, 1, 2, \dots \tag{1} \] or \[ X_n = b_nX_{n-1} + a_nX_{n-2}\quad\text{for}\;n = 1, 2, 3, \dots\,.\tag{2} \] These are typically continued fractions converging to ratios of two functions of similar type. In this paper she concentrates on the group containing the first continued fraction identities in his notebooks, more precisely, the ones in entry 12.1 to 12.18 in [\textit{B. C. Berndt}, Ramanujan's notebooks. Part II. New York etc.: Springer-Verlag (1989; Zbl 0716.11001)]. In section two the author shows that identities of this kind are easy to construct, if one starts at the right end of the problem. The key notion here is tail sequences which is a very useful tool in modern continued fraction theory. This suggests that Ramanujan's ``secret weapon'' might have been tail sequences, long before this simple, but powerful tool was fully established. But then the natural question arises: what motivated Ramanujan to write down the identities he actually chose? In section three she argues that his first notebook entries can be regarded as prototypes of different tricks in connection with tail sequences. It seems that he has systematically written down these identities, not for the sake of the identities themselves, but as an illustration of the trick. The methods suggested in the present paper involve the use of standard continued fraction theory. Ramanujan demonstrates very clearly that at least parts of this theory were familiar to him. The question is whether he was acquainted with the Bauer-Muir transformation. It was published independently by \textit{G. Bauer} [Von einem Kettenbruch von Euler und einem Theorem von Wallis, Abh. Kgl. Bayr. Akad. Wiss., München, Zweite Kl., 11, 99--116 (1872)] and \textit{Th. Muir} [A theorem in continuants. Phil. Mag. (5) III, 137--138 (1877; JFM 09.0103.03)] in the 1870's. The author suggests that he actually did, either from the literature or by deriving it himself. For the sake of completeness, tail sequences and the Bauer-Muir transformation are described in Sect. 2 of this paper. In Sect. 3 she goes through the first of his continued fraction entries in light of this idea. (From the introduction)