Rate My Professor Bruce Berndt

Berndt specializes in analytic number theory, with research interests encompassing classical analysis related to Ramanujan's notebooks, infinite series, elliptic and modular functions, theta-functions, q-series, continued fractions, character sums, special functions, asymptotic series, and contour integration. In 1974, he began systematically proving the approximately 3,000–4,000 claims in Ramanujan's three earlier notebooks (circa 1904–1914), completing this task in the late 1990s with the aid of doctoral students. The results were published as the five-volume series Ramanujan's Notebooks (Springer, 1985–1998). From the mid-1990s, supported by Guggenheim and Sloan Foundation fellowships, he collaborated with George E. Andrews to prove and edit claims from Ramanujan's lost notebook (discovered 1976) and other unpublished manuscripts, culminating in the five-volume Ramanujan's Lost Notebook and Other Unpublished Papers, with the final volume in 2018. For this seminal work, Berndt received the American Mathematical Society's Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition in 1996. He is Founding Editor of the International Journal of Number Theory, Editor of The Ramanujan Journal, and Associate Editor for journals including Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications and Advances in Applied Mathematics. Recent publications include "Cubic and quintic analogues of Ramanujan’s septic theta function identity" (2025, The Ramanujan Journal) and "Identities for the product of two Dirichlet series satisfying Hecke's functional equation" (2025, Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications). In 2012, he was awarded the Campus Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring. Berndt has delivered hundreds of invited lectures worldwide and inspired conferences in his honor.