Nested square roots and Poincaré functions (Q330484)

Let \(c\) be a real number with \(c \geq 2\) and \(\{ \varepsilon_i \}_{i=1}^{\infty} \) an infinite sequence consisting of \(\pm 1\). Functional equations of the form NEWLINE\[NEWLINEf(sx) = f(x)^2 - c \tag{1}NEWLINE\]NEWLINE where \(s\) is a constant depending only on \(c\) were studied by Poincaré. He proved that there exists an entire function \(f(x)\) satisfying the above functional equation. In this paper, the authors study the nested square roots of the form NEWLINE\[NEWLINER_c (\varepsilon_1, \varepsilon_2, \varepsilon_3,\dots, \varepsilon_m) = \varepsilon_1 \, \sqrt{c + \varepsilon_2 \,\sqrt{ c + \varepsilon_3\, \sqrt{ c + \cdots + \, \varepsilon_m \, \sqrt{c}}}} \tag{2}NEWLINE\]NEWLINE and infinite nested square roots NEWLINE\[NEWLINER_c (\varepsilon_1, \varepsilon_2, \varepsilon_3,\dots ) := \lim_{m \to \infty} R_c (\varepsilon_1, \varepsilon_2, \varepsilon_3, \dots , \varepsilon_m) . \tag{3}NEWLINE\]NEWLINE The authors establish the existence of the limit (3) as a special value of the Poincaré function \(f(x)\) that satisfies the functional equation (1). In the case \(c=2\), it known that the nested root (2) can be expressed by the sine function NEWLINE\[NEWLINER_c (\varepsilon_1, \varepsilon_2, \varepsilon_3,\dots, \varepsilon_m) = 2 \sin {{\pi} \over 2} \left ( {{\varepsilon_1} \over { 2}} + {{\varepsilon_1\varepsilon_2} \over { 2^2}} + \cdots + {{\varepsilon_1\varepsilon_2\cdots \varepsilon_m} \over { 2^m}} \right ). NEWLINE\]