The evaluation of a weighted sum of Gauss hypergeometric functions and its connection with Galton-Watson processes (Q829821)

The aim of the paper it to evaluate a weighted sum of Gauss hypergeometric functions for certain ranges of the argument, weights and parameters. The authors establish the domain of absolute convergence of this series by determining the growth of the hypergeometric function for large summation index. They show an application to Galton-Watson branching processes arising in the theory of stochastic processes and introduce a new class of positive integer-valued distributions with power tails.