Rational function approximations of the special function e^{x}E_{1}(x) and applications to irrationality of Euler-Gompertz constant \delta

Authors Naoki Murabayashi, Hayato Yoshida

Publication date 13 October 2022

Abstract: We gave a method to construct a continued fraction of the function

F (x) := e^{x} E_{1} (x)

. More precisely we define

F_{1} (x)

as the reciprocal of

F (x)

and we inductively define

F_{m} (x)

as the reciprocal of ``

F_{m - 1} (x)

minus the main term of

F_{m - 1} (x)

at infinity. This method is analogous to the regular continued fraction expansion of real numbers. In this paper we prove that the continued fraction converges to $F (x)$ for any positive real number $x > 0$ by following the proof of that the regular continued fraction of a positive and irrational real number $a l p h a$ converges to $a l p h a$ . Essentially we prove inequalities for $Q_{m} (x)$ (in Theorem 4.1) and inequalities $F_{m} (x) > 0$ (in Section 5). In particular, we prove stronger inequalities $d i s p l a y s t y l e f r a c P_{2 k} (x) Q_{2 k} (x) < F (x) < d i s p l a y s t y l e f r a c P_{2 k - 1} (x) Q_{2 k - 1} (x)$ (than $F_{m} (x) > 0$ ) and give two proofs of these. In Section 6, we show an asymptotic relation between $Q_{2 k} (x)$ and $Q_{2 k - 1} (x)$ by using properties of the classical Laguerre polynomial. In Section 7, we consider Euler-Gompertz constant $d e l t a$ . As far as we know, irrationality of $d e l t a$ is still an open problem. We construct a sequence of rationals $d i s p l a y s t y l e f r a c A_{i} B_{i} (i = 1, 2, 3, c d o t s)$ such that $d e l t a B_{i} - A_{i}$ approaches 0 as $i$ approaches infinity and give a sufficient condition of that $d e l t a B_{i} - A_{i} e q 0$ for any positive integer $i$ . Therefore, if it is proved that this condition holds, it completes a proof of irrationality of Euler-Gompertz constant $d e l t a$ .

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