On Ramanujan's modular equations and Hecke groups

Abstract

Inspired by the work of Ramanujan, many people have studied generalized modular equations and the numerous identities found by Ramanujan. These identities known as modular equations can be transformed into polynomial equations. There is no developed theory about how to find the degrees of these polynomial modular equations explicitly. In this paper, we determine the degrees of the polynomial modular equations explicitly and study the relation between Hecke groups and modular equations in Ramanujan's theories of signatures 2, 3, and 4.