Remarks on the complex geometry of the 3-monopole

We develop the Ercolani-Sinha construction of SU(2) monopoles and make this effective for (a five parameter family of centred) charge 3 monopoles. In particular we show how to solve the transcendental constraints arising on the spectral curve. For a class of symmetric curves the transcendental constraints become a number theoretic problem and a recently proven identity of Ramanujan provides a solution. The Ercolani-Sinha construction provides a gauge-transform of the Nahm data.