After Ramanujan’s death, in 1923, Hardy spent three to four
months on Chaperter XII of the second notebook, on Hypergeometric
series, and in the introduction to the paper he published, he
wrote: a systematic verification of the results would be a very
heavy undertaking.
After
this experience Hardy decided to go back to his own research work
and tried to persuade the University of Madras to undertake such
a task and in turn, Prof. G.N. Watson was requested by the Madras
University, in 1931, to edit the notebooks in a suitable form
for publication. This was a formidable task since the notebooks
contained about 4000 theorems.
Watson
undertook the task of editing the notebooks with Prof. B.M. Wilson
and
They focused their attention on the
second notebook. Chapters 2-13 were to be edited by Wilson, and
Watson was to examine chapters 14-21. Unfortunately, Wilson passed
away prematurely in 1935 at the age of 38.
This
possibly put an end to the joint effort of Watson and Wilson to
edit the notebooks.
