How To Do Monthly Problems With Your Computer

DOI10.2307/2975078MaRDI QIDQ4361610zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors István Nemes, Herbert S. Wilf, Doron Zeilberger, Marko Petkovšek

Publication date 16 December 1997

Published in The American Mathematical Monthly (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.2307/2975078

Combinatorial identities, bijective combinatorics (05A19) Generalized hypergeometric series, ({}_pF_q) (33C20) Symbolic computation and algebraic computation (68W30)

Review text

The purpose of this exposition is to ``spread the word that algorithms exists to evaluate, in closed form, large classes of sums that involve factorials, binomial coefficients, and their \(q\)-analogues. The algorithms in question are Sister Celine's method, Gosper's algorithm, Zeilberger's algorithm (CT ``creative telescoping), Wilf and Zeilberger's WZ method, and Petkovšek's algorithm (Hyper). If fairly loose hypotheses are satisfied, primarily that the summands are hypergeometric, then these procedures are guaranteed to decide whether the sum has a closed form expression and to find it when it exists. To illustrate the scope of the method, computer programs in \textit{Maple} or \textit{Mathematica} for example, are applied to 27 problems that have appeared in the Problems section of the American Mathematical Monthly. As a typical example, Problem 10494 (posed in 1996, p. 74) asks the reader to evaluate the sum \[ \sum_{k=0}^{2n} (-1)^k {4n \choose 2k} \Biggl/ {2n \choose k} \] for each positive integer \(n\). Gosper's algorithm, with nearly no human help, provides the solution \(1/(1-2n)\).

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