On two conjectures of Sun concerning Apéry-like series (Q6085845)

Let \(\zeta(s) := \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} n^{-s}\) be the Riemann zeta function for \(\Re (s) >1\). In the 1979's proof of the irrationality of \(\zeta(3)\), \textit{R. Apéry} [Astérisque 61, 11--13 (1979; Zbl 0401.10049)] made use of the following infinite series involving central binomial coefficients: \[ \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac{(-1)^{n-1}}{n^{3}\binom{2n}{n}}=\frac{2}{5}\zeta(3). \] Since then, the \textit{Apéry-like} series have attracted much attention and many tools and theories have been developed to evaluate these series in closed forms. In particular, since late 1980s Z.-W. Sun has discovered many beautiful and highly nontrivial identities of infinite series, often involving interesting objects such as Harmonic numbers, Fibonacci numbers, Bernoulli numbers, Euler numbers, etc. The paper under review is to prove two conjectures of Z.-W. Sun concerning Apéry-like series: \begin{align*} &\sum_{n=0}^\infty\frac{\binom{2n}{n}}{(2n+1)^3 16^n}\left(9H_{2n+1}+\frac{32}{2n+1}\right)=40\beta(4)+\frac{5}{12}\pi \zeta(3),\\ &\sum_{n=0}^\infty\frac{\binom{2n}{n}}{(2n+1)^2(-16)^n}\left(5H_{2n+1}+\frac{12}{2n+1}\right)=14\zeta(3), \end{align*} where \(H_n\) is classical harmonic number defined by \[ H_n:=\sum_{k=1}^{n}\frac{1}{k},\quad\text{for~}n=1,2,3,\ldots, \] and \(\beta(s)\) is Dirichlet beta function defined by \[ \beta(s):=\sum_{n=0}^{\infty}\frac{(-1)^n}{(2n+1)^s},\quad\text{for~}\Re (s)>0. \] Their main strategy is to convert the series (resp. the alternating series) to log-sine-cosine (resp. log-sinh-cosh) integrals. Then they express all these integrals using single-valued Bloch-Wigner-Ramakrishnan-Wojtkowiak-Zagier polylogarithms. The conjectures then follow from a few rather non-trivial functional equations of those polylogarithms in weight \(3\) and \(4\).