​​​​In the spring of 1976, George Andrews of Pennsylvania State University visited the library at Trinity College, Cambridge, to examine the papers of the late G.N. Watson. Among these papers, Andrews discovered a sheaf of 138 pages in the handwriting of Srinivasa Ramanujan. This manuscript was soon designated, “Ramanujan’s lost notebook.” Its discovery has frequently been deemed the mathematical equivalent of finding Beethoven’s tenth symphony.

This volume is the third of five volumes that the authors plan to write on Ramanujan’s lost notebook and other manuscripts and fragments found in The Lost Notebook and Other Unpublished Papers, published by Narosa in 1988.  The ordinary partition function p(n) is the focus of this third volume.