Peter Forrester is a world expert on random matrix theory and related areas of mathematics, including the occurrence of identities of the Rogers-Ramanujan type in exactly solvable statistical mechanical lattice models. He applied the theory of Selberg integrals, generalized hypergeometric functions and Jack polynomials to the integrable l/r2 quantum many-body problem, obtaining perfect agreement with the new physical interpretation in terms of quasi-particle statistics. This enabled Forrester to successfully apply the theory of Painlevé equations to the very active topic of random matrix theory, with its relevance to the Riemann hypothesis and to the statistical analysis of large data sets.