Appendix (Q5903078)

The paper to which this is the appendix contains proofs of the more than one hundred claims of Ramanujan, or else a reference to a published proof if one exists. After reading a preprint of that paper I was motivated to describe a few general settings for continued fractions, including the three term recurrence relations satisfied by \({}_ 2F_ 1(a,b;c;x)\), \({}_ 3F_ 2(a,b,c;d,e;1)\), balanced \({}_ 4F_ 3's\), and very well posed \({}_ 7F_ 6's\), and the connection between orthogonal polynomials, continued fractions, and Stieltjes transform found by Markov and Stieltjes. There are also continued fractions that come from basic hypergeometric series and their contiguous relations that are briefly alluded to. These also extend to higher series, and exist for very well poised balanced \(_{10}\phi_ 9's\). Ramanujan did not seem to know any of these general settings, except for the \({}_ 2F_ 1's\), yet he found many fascinating results that we cannot fit into our known frameworks. One wonders what he would have done if his early training and education had been better.