Convergent power series of \(\operatorname{sech}(x)\) and solutions to nonlinear differential equations (Q1656168)

Summary: It is known that power series expansion of certain functions such as \(\operatorname{sech}(x)\) diverges beyond a finite radius of convergence. We present here an iterative power series expansion (IPS) to obtain a power series representation of \(\operatorname{sech}(x)\) that is convergent for all \(x\). The convergent series is a sum of the Taylor series of \(\operatorname{sech}(x)\) and a complementary series that cancels the divergence of the Taylor series for \(x \geq \pi / 2\). The method is general and can be applied to other functions known to have finite radius of convergence, such as \(1 /(1 + x^2)\). A straightforward application of this method is to analytically solve nonlinear differential equations, which we also illustrate here. The method provides also a robust and very efficient numerical algorithm for solving nonlinear differential equations numerically. A detailed comparison with the fourth-order Runge-Kutta method and extensive analysis of the behavior of the error and CPU time are performed.