Modular forms and Eisenstein's continued fractions (Q2488819)

The main goal of this article is to give a self-contained treatment of some continued fraction expansions of \(q\)-series from Eisenstein's collected works. Eisenstein gave twenty different continued fraction expansions, although he did not prove them. \textit{T. Muir} [On Eisenstein's continued fraction, Trans. Edinb. 28, 135--143 (1877; JFM 09.0146.01)] showed that all can be derived from five basic expansions from Eisenstein's work, and in the paper under review, the author gives a complete treatment of three of these. The arguments are based on explicit recurrence relations satisfied by related series, and according to the author ``illustrate methods likely similar to those used by Eisenstein to derive [his expansions].'' As a sample of the results, we give the expansion for the theta function \(\vartheta (q) = \sum_{n\in \mathbb Z} q^{n^{2}}\): \[ \vartheta (q) = 1+{2q \over 1-}{q^{3} \over 1-}{q^{5}-q^{3} \over 1-}{q^{7}\over 1-}{q^{9}-q^{5} \over 1-}{q^{11} \over 1-}{q^{13}-q^{7} \over 1-}\dots \]