A short, elementary, and easy, WZ proof of the Askey-Gasper inequality that was used by de Branges in his proof of the Bieberbach conjecture (Q688698): Difference between revisions

The so-called Askey-Gasper inequality is the positivity of a particular \({_ 2F_ 2}\). The first proof came from writing this \({_ 3F_ 2}\) as the sum with positive coefficients of other \({_ 3F_ 2}\)'s and then remarking that Clausen had shown that these \({_ 3F_ 2}\)'s are squares of \({_ 2F_ 1}\)'s. The author's master wrote a program which it ran to prove Clausen's identity in an equivalent form, and an equivalent identity to the expansion mentioned above. The paper concludes with some comments on identities, their proofs and their discovery. While I agree that the formulation of an identity is almost always the harder and most important step, it is not true as the author writes, that once stated any fool can prove an identity. There are conjectured identities which are not only unproven, but no one has any idea how to approach them.