Andy's Math/CS page

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

A Rather Elegant Solution

So I'm co-writing a survey paper for a course project, and struggling with the conflicting demands of completeness and brevity. As if charmed, while taking a break I happen upon a '99 paper called "50 years of Bailey's Lemma" by S. Warnaar whose abstract really resonates:

"Half a century ago, The Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society published W. N. Bailey’s influential paper Identities of the Rogers–Ramanujan type... To celebrate the occasion of the lemma’s fiftieth birthday we present a history of Bailey’s lemma in 5 chapters...
Due to size limitations of this paper the higher rank [42, 40, 43, 41, 14, 60] and trinomial [11, 59, 19] generalizations of the Bailey lemma will be treated at the lemma’s centennial in 2049."