Ramanujan: Making sense of 1+2+3+... = -1/12 and Co.

The Mathologer sets out to make sense of 1 2 3 ... = -1/12 and some of those other notorious, crazy-looking infinite sum identities. The starting point for this video is the famous letter that led to the discovery of self-taught mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan in 1913 (Ramanujan is the subject of the movie “The man who knew infinity“ that just started showing in cinemas.) Find out about how these identities come up in Ramanujan’s work, the role of “just do it“ in math, the rules for adding infinite sums on Earth and other worlds, and what all this has to do with the mathematical super star the Riemann Zeta function. You can download the jpeg of Ramanujan’s letter to Hardy that I put together for this video here: (quite large) You can access a scanned copy of Ramanujan’s notebook here: http://~rao/ramanujan/NoteBooks/NoteBook1/chapterVIII/ or check this out https://books.