TITLE: Is the field of q-series 'dead'?
QUESTION [24 upvotes]: I had a discussion with my advisor about what am I interested as my future research direction and I said it is special functions and q-series. He laughed and said that the topic is essentially dead and the people who study it are dinosaurs. I'm really confused by this statement and don't know what to think. Is this area really dead and not worth pursuing a research in it?

REPLY [13 votes]: The reports of the death of the field of $q$-series and special functions are greatly exaggerated. George Andrews wrote a book Q-Series on the subject published in 1986. He and Bruce Berndt last year completed the publication of a five volume edition about the results in Ramanujan's Lost Notebook. An important subject for Ramanujan was $q$-series and special functions. George Andrews is a former President of the AMS with many awards.
Ken Ono, the Vice President of the AMS, has done research on Rogers-Ramanujan identities, Mock theta functions, and recently he and his coworkers have proved the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture. In joint work with Jan Bruinier, he discovered a finite algebraic formula for computing partition numbers. The partition numbers are the coefficients of the reciprocal of the fundamental $q$-series $(q;q)_\infty$. There are many other examples that I could cite, but this should be enough.

REPLY [9 votes]: I think that (properly understood) theory of $q-$series is one of the most fashionable areas of mathematics right now. One reason is the appearance of $q-$series in topology. Namely, Turaev-Viro TQFT associates to each $3-$manifold with boundary a $q-$special function, defined for $q$ being a root of unity. These functions are expected to be $q-$holonomic, so should satisfy interesting difference equations. The building block for these invariants is so-called quantum  $6j-$symbol, which coincides with ${}_4F_3-$ basic hypergeometric series with general parameters at $z=1$.