Kovacic's algorithm and its application to some families of special functions (Q1205132)

The article deals with the classical question of deciding whether or not a linear ordinary differential equation with rational coefficients has Liouvillian solutions and computing them if any. Liouvillian (or closed- form) solutions are those which can be built from \(\mathbb{C}(x)\) by algebraic operations and taking exponentials or primitives. A decision procedure to solve this problem for arbitrary order equations was presented by Singer. Although this solves the problem in principle, this procedure is not an algorithm that can be readily implemented. In contrast, the case of equations of order two having their coefficients in \(\mathbb{C}(x)\) was solved by Kovacic in a completely effective manner. In this article a slightly modified version of this algorithm is applied to families of second order equations, that is equations in which the coefficients depend upon some external parameters. The examples treated are mainly hypergeometric and Heun's equations.