Readers will learn in the introduction to this volume that mathematicians owe a huge debt to R.A. Rankin and J.M. Whittaker for their efforts in preserving Ramanujan's "Lost Notebook." If it were not for them， Ramanujan's lost notebook likely would have been permanently lost. Rankin was born in Garlieston， Scotland， in October 1915 and died in Glasgow in January 2001. For several years he was professor of Mathematics at the University of Glasgow. An account of his life and work has been given by B.C. Berndt， W. Kohnen， and K. Ono in [79]. Whittaker was born in March 1905 in Cambridge and died in Sheffield in January 1984. At his retirement， he was vicechancellor of Sheffield University. A description of Whittaker's life and work has been written by W.K， Hayman.


This volume is the first of approamately four volumes devoted to the examination of all claims made by Srinivasa Ramanujan in The Lost Notebook and Other Unpublished Papers. This publication contains Ramanujan's famous lost notebook； copies of unpublished manuscripts in the Oxford library， in particular， his famous unpublished manuscript on the partition function and the tau-function； fragments of both published and unpublished papers； miscellaneous sheets； and Ramanujan's letters to G.H. Hardy， written from nursing homes during Ramanujan's final two years in England. This volume contains accounts of 442 entries （counting multiplicities） made by Ramanujan in the aforementioned publication. The present authors have organized these claims into eighteen chapters， containing anywhere from two entries in Chapter 13 to sixty-one entries in Chapter 17.