CAUCHY AUGMENTATION FOR BASIC HYPERGEOMETRIC SERIES (Q4465110)

The authors introduce a method which they call ``Cauchy augmentation'', in order to derive certain summation and transformation formulas for basic hypergeometric series from specializations of them. This method is essentially an application to those series of an identity, due to Cauchy, which gives the expansion of a power of \(x\) in terms of the \(q\)-binomial coefficients. This identity plays a key role in the proposed method despite its simple form. In particular, by this method the authors derive from Euler's identity for \(q\)-series, a classical \(q\)-series identity which is the \(q\)-analogue of the binomial Theorem and it is also due to Cauchy. From this formula, using the ``Cauchy augmentation'' once again, the authors obtain Heine's \(q\)-analogue of the Gauss summation formula for a \(_{2}\varphi_{1}\) basic hypergeometric series. By the same method the authors obtain from the \(q\)-Vandermonde-Chu identity a transformation formula from \(_{2}\varphi_{1}\) to \(_{3}\varphi_{1}\) derived by Jackson. They also obtain a transformation formula analogous to Jackson's formula. All the classical \(q\)-series identities mentioned in this paper can be found in the standard reference book [\textit{G.~ Gasper} and \textit{M.~ Rahman}, Basic hypergeometric series. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge (1990; Zbl 0695.33001)].