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This article is in commemoration of Ramanujan's election as Fellow of The Royal Society 100 years ago, as celebrated at the October 2018 scientific meeting at the Royal Society in London. Ramanujan's last letter to Hardy, written shortly after his election, surrounds his mock theta functions. While these functions have been of great importance and interest in the decades following Ramanujan's death in 1920, it was unclear how exactly they fit into the theory of modular forms—Dyson called this ‘a challenge for the future’ at another centenary conference in Illinois in 1987, honouring the 100th anniversary of Ramanujan's birth. In the early 2000s, Zwegers finally recognized that Ramanujan had discovered glimpses of special families of non-holomorphic modular forms, which we now know to be Bruinier and Funke's harmonic Maass forms from 2004, the holomorphic parts of which are called mock modular forms. As of a few years ago, a fundamental question from Ramanujan's last letter remained, on a certain asymptotic relationship between mock theta functions and ordinary modular forms. The author, with Ono and Rhoades, revisited Ramanujan's asymptotic claim, and established a connection between mock theta functions and quantum modular forms, which were not defined until 90 years later in 2010 by Zagier. Here, we bring together past and present, and study the relationships between mock modular forms and quantum modular forms, with Ramanujan's mock theta functions as motivation. In particular, we highlight recent work of Bringmann–Rolen, Choi–Lim–Rhoades and Griffin–Ono–Rolen in our discussion. This article is largely expository, but not exclusively: we also establish a new interpretation of Ramanujan's radial asymptotic limits in the subject of topology. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Srinivasa Ramanujan: in celebration of the centenary of his election as FRS’.
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Asymptotic expansions, partial theta functions, and radial limit differences of mock modular and modular forms
In 1920, Ramanujan studied the asymptotic differences between his mock theta functions and modular theta functions, as [Formula: see text] tends towards roots of unity singularities radially from within the unit disk. In 2013, the bounded asymptotic differences predicted by Ramanujan with respect to his mock theta function [Formula: see text] were established by Ono, Rhoades, and the author, as a special case of a more general result, in which they were realized as special values of a quantum modular form. Our results here are threefold: we realize these radial limit differences as special values of a partial theta function, provide full asymptotic expansions for the partial theta function as [Formula: see text] tends towards roots of unity radially, and explicitly evaluate the partial theta function at roots of unity as simple finite sums of roots of unity.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1901791
- PAR ID:
- 10230348
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Number Theory
- Volume:
- 17
- Issue:
- 02
- ISSN:
- 1793-0421
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 425 to 434
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1142/S1793042120400126
