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Rogers-Ramanujan Identities Get Context and Company

Mathematicians at Emory University and the University of Queensland have found a framework for the Rogers-Ramanujan identities.

S. Ole Warnaar (Queensland) found a way to use representation theory to embed the identities into a much larger class of similar identities, and Ken Ono and Michael Griffin (Emory) figured out how to extract infinitely many functions whose values are algebraic numbers.

Penn State mathematician George Andrews says the work "has given us a big picture of the general setting for these identities, and deepened our theoretical understanding for many of the breakthroughs in this area of mathematics during the past 100 years."

Read phys.org's coverage.

Start Date: 
Thursday, May 15, 2014