Indiana Jones and the Magical Oracle
Mathematician Ken Ono in the December 2010 American Mathematical Society Notices—
The "dying genius" here is Ramanujan, not Galois. The story now continues at the AMS website—
(Excerpt from Jan. 27 screenshot;
the partitions story has been the top
news item at the site all week.)
From a Jan. 20, 2011, Emory University press release —
"Finite formula found for partition numbers" —
"We found a function, that we call P, that is like a magical oracle," Ono says. "I can take any number, plug it into P, and instantly calculate the partitions of that number. P does not return gruesome numbers with infinitely many decimal places. It's the finite, algebraic formula that we have all been looking for."
For an introduction to the magical oracle, see a preprint, "Bruinier-Ono," at the American Institute of Mathematics website.
Ono also discussed the oracle in a video (see minute 25) recorded Jan. 21 and placed online today.
See as well "Exact formulas for the partition function?" at mathoverflow.net.
A Nov. 29, 2010, remark by Thomas Bloom on that page leads to a 2006 preprint by Ono and Kathrin Bringmann, "An Arithmetic Formula for the Partition Function*," that seems not unrelated to Ono's new "magical oracle" formula—
The Bruinier-Ono paper does not mention the earlier Bringmann-Ono work.
(Both the 2011 Bruinier-Ono paper and the 2006 Bringmann-Ono paper mention their debt to a 2002 work by Zagier— Don Zagier, "Traces of singular moduli," in Motives, Polylogarithms and Hodge theory, Part II (Irvine, CA, 1998), International Press Lecture Series 3 (International Press, Somerville, MA, 2002), pages 211-244.)
Some background for those who prefer mathematics to narrative—
The Web of Modularity: Arithmetic of the Coefficients of Modular Forms and q-Series ,
by Ken Ono, American Mathematical Society CBMS Series, 2004.