Abstract
We examine a large class of infinite triple series and establish a general summation formula. This is done by expressing the triple series in terms of definite integrals involving arctangent function that are evaluated in turn in closed forms. Numerous explicit formulae are tabulated for the triple series whose values result in elegant expressions as , and the Catalan constant G.
MSC:
11B65; 65B10
1. Introduction and Outline
In mathematics and applied sciences, there exist numerous infinite series [1,2]. For example, the double series of Mordell [3,4] and Tornheim [5,6,7,8] play an important role in the number theory. In his collected works, Ramanujan [9] made explorations to several remarkable series (see also [10]).
From calculus, there are two simple but well-known series
Their tensor product with zeta function and extensions lead to intensive investigations on Euler–Zagier sums and multiple zeta values (see for example [11,12,13]). These works suggest the authors to examine naturally, for and , the following triple series
The aim of this article is to evaluate explicitly this series. Firstly, it is trivial to see that there holds the following symmetry:
Then for and , recall the binomial identity
which can be explained by the finite differences (i.e., the mth difference of a polynomial of degree ). When , the series can be manipulated as follows:
where the lower limit m of the sum with respect to n is replaced by 0 because
Hence, we get the following recurrence relation.
Lemma 1 (Recurrence relation: ).
Particularly for , the following simplified recurrence holds:
By writing the two inner sums as definite integrals
where exchanging orders of summation and integration is justified by Lebesgue’s dominated convergence theorem ([14], §11.32), we can express as
Evaluating the inner sum by the binomial theorem
leads us to the following double integral representation.
Lemma 2 (Integral representation: and ).
Based on Lemmas 1 and 2, we deduce the following preliminary facts.
- In this case, the corresponding double integral becomes a product of two single integralsBoth integrals are computable since their integrands are simple rational functions.
- According to the binomial theorem, by expanding in Lemma 2, we can express in terms of .
- In view of Lemma 1, we can write in terms of or . Taking account of symmetry, we only need to evaluate for and .
By making use of the algebraic relation
we can express
where
Therefore, the evaluation of series is simplified to analyzing series and . They will be treated separately in the next two sections. Finally, the paper will end in Section 4, where a conclusive theorem will be presented together with several tabulated sample formulae.
Throughout the paper, we shall utilize the following notations. For an indeterminate x and , the rising and falling factorials are defined by and
Analogous to the harmonic numbers and odd harmonic numbers [13,15,16,17,18]
we shall employ their “skewed” variants (cf. [19,20,21,22]):
Most of our summation formulae are expressed in terms of , and Catalan’s constant (cf. [23,24,25])
In order to assure the accuracy of computations, numerical tests for all the equations have been made by appropriately devised Mathematica commands.
2. Evaluation of
In view of the integral expression in Lemma 2, consider the difference
By applying the equation
and then the symmetry, we can manipulate the double integral
which yields the expression
Henceforth, is defined by the parametric integral
By employing the integration by parts
we get the following recurrence relation
Iterating this relation times (under the condition ), we find that
where and are evaluated explicitly below
Lemma 3 ().
By substitution, we can proceed further
Evaluate the two integrals
where the first one is done as follows:
Then we can express the difference
Denote the last sum by ∇, we can manipulate it as follows:
Therefore, we have established the following recurrence relation.
Proposition 1 ().
Remark 1.
According to this proposition, it can be seen that for and for ; where denotes the -linear space spanned by . Furthermore, by iterating the recursion times, we derive, for , the following explicit formula
Proof.
The initial values corresponding to and are determined by
when , the integral can be evaluated directly
where the last line is justified by
□
We highlight from Proposition 1 the following infinite series identities.
3. Evaluation of
Now we are going to evaluate
Recalling the partial fraction decomposition
we can integrate
This reduces to a single integral
where the integrand is given by
Observing that
we find the recurrence relation
where the non–homogeneous term reads explicitly as
The integral will be evaluated in Lemma 6. According to the recurrence (11), we infer that as long as are known, we can deduce all for . Analogously, we claim that as long as are known, we can deduce all for .
3.1.
In order to evaluate explicitly, we have to do that for the above two integrals, that are treated in the next two separate lemmas.
Firstly, it is not hard to evaluate the arctan-integral below.
Lemma 4
(). Let χ be the logical function defined by and . Then we have the following integral formulae:
Then for another integral of the rational function
by means of the integration by parts, we have
which results in the following recurrence relation
Under the replacement with , the above equation can be restated as
Iterating ℓ times this equation gives that
By assigning and for and , respectively, we get from the above equation the following recurrent formulae.
Lemma 5 (, and ).
In the above lemma, the two integrals on the right are evaluated explicitly below:
Finally, we find the following expression for the non-homogeneous term.
Lemma 6 ().
3.2. with
For , it is not difficult to check that
This is justified by combining two integrals
Interestingly, there is a counterpart integral evaluation
In general for , integrating with respect to x gives
Recalling Lemma 3, we can compute the rightmost integral
This leads us to the general formula
3.3. with
When , it is almost routine to proceed with
Summing up, we have proved the following general result.
Proposition 2 ( and ).
Assuming and as in Lemmas 4 and 5, we have the following formulae:
Remark 2.
This proposition clearly implies the remarkable fact that for and for .
According to Proposition 2, it is possible to compute when and are specified by small values. For and , the corresponding values of are recorded in the following table.
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | |
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4. Evaluation of
Recalling the integral representation in Lemma 2, is symmetric in and . Suppose that and with . By Lemma 1, we can write
In view of the algebraic relation
we can proceed further with
By substitution, we arrive at the following conclusive theorem.
Theorem 1 ( and ).
For any triplet integers with and , the corresponding always has the value in for and for , where denotes the -linear space spanned by . More precisely, assuming and as in Proposition 1 and Proposition 2, respectively, the following infinite series identity holds:
According to this theorem, we tabulate the summation formulae for triple series with and below.
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Author Contributions
Writing—original draft, W.C.; Writing—review & editing, C.L. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
This research received no external funding.
Informed Consent Statement
Not applicable.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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