Summation of divergent power series by means of factorial series (Q608521): Difference between revisions

The author started his work on summing divergent series around 1985 [cf. Comput. Phys. Rep. 10, 189--371 (1989), Los Alamos Preprint \url{arXiv:math-ph/0306302}] using a.o. Levin's sequence transformation [\textit{D. Levin}, Int. J. Comput. Math. 3, 371--388 (1973; Zbl 0274.65004)]. An important tool was the so-called factorial series \[ \Omega(z)={a_0\over z}+{a_1 1!\over z(z+1)}+{a_2 2!\over z(z+1)(z+2)}+\ldots = \sum_{n=0}^{\infty}\, {a_n n!\over (z)_{n+1}}, \] where the Pochhammer symbol (ascending factorial) is given by \[ (z)_{n+1}=z(z+1)(z+2)\cdots (z+n) \] (the use of \(a_n n!\) instead of just \(a_n\) often offers formal advantages). This type of series was used extensively by James Stirling in his 1730 book that was translated by \textit{I. Tweddle} [James Stirling's Methodus Differentialis: An annotated translation of Stirling's text. London: Springer (2003; Zbl 1031.01008)]. After a short Introduction (\S1), the layout of the paper is as follows: \S2: My ``rediscovery'' of factorial series, \S3: Basic properties oof factorial series, \S4: Transformation of inverse power series and factorial series, \S5: Stieltjes series, \S6: Summation of the asymptotic series for the exponential integral \S7: Conversion of a power series to a factorial series, \S8: The quartic anharmonic oscillator. The paper concludes with a short outlook towards further study and developments. Finally, appendices on properties of Stirling numbers and a more general approach to sequence transformation (using triangular matrices) is given.