Letter to G. H. Hardy, 16 January 1913

Edition

The letter as printed in Collected Papers of Srinivasa Ramanujan, edited by G. H. Hardy, P. V. Seshu Aiyar and B. M. Wilson (Cambridge University Press, 1927), p. xxiii, in Hardy’s notice of Ramanujan, first printed in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society (2), xix (1921). Kept: the letter itself, complete as printed there, from “Madras, 16th January 1913” to the postscript; left out: Hardy’s text around it and the extracts from “the papers enclosed” and from later letters that he prints after it. The text comes from the OCR of the Internet Archive item pli.kerala.rare.28155 (Kerala State Library copy), corrected on the scan of that page and compared with the OCR of a second scan of the same edition on the Internet Archive; the line with the integral, which both OCRs garble, and the formulas were set from the scan. Words hyphenated at line ends are rejoined; the formulas and the italic n are set with KaTeX and italics; the place and date, the salutation and the signature, set in small capitals as printed, keep their lines.

Rights

Srinivasa Ramanujan died on 26 April 1920 (Wikidata Q83163); the letter was first printed in 1921 and in this edition in 1927. It is in the public domain in France, where the author died before 1 January 1956, and in the United States, where it was published before 1 January 1931. Hardy (died 1 December 1947, Wikidata Q184337), who printed it, would also be in the public domain in France, but none of his text is reproduced.

Hardy writes, just before the letter, that Ramanujan’s letters were probably not entirely his own and that friends gave him some assistance with the English; those friends are not named.