The Rogers–Ramanujan continued fraction

Shaun Cooper presents the New Zealand Mathematical Society seminar on 13 October 2021. Abstract: Just over 100 years ago, an unknown clerk from India wrote some letters to Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy. About certain results in one of the letters, Hardy later wrote “(they) defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before” and concluded "A single look at them is enough to show that they could only be written down by a mathematician of the highest class.” This talk describes these particular results, puts them in a modern context, and outlines some recent developments.