From Euler's play with infinite series to the anomalous magnetic moment
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Publication:670895
DOI10.1007/978-981-13-2715-5_3zbMATH Open1409.81171arXiv1804.09553OpenAlexW2963382187MaRDI QIDQ670895FDOQ670895
Authors: Juan-Miguel Gracia 
Publication date: 20 March 2019
Abstract: During a first St. Petersburg period Leonhard Euler, in his early twenties, became interested in the Basel problem: summing the series of inverse squares (posed by Pietro Mengoli in mid 17th century). In the words of Andre Weil (1989) "as with most questions that ever attracted his attention, he never abandoned it". Euler introduced on the way the alternating "phi-series", the better converging companion of the zeta function, the first example of a polylogarithm at a root of unity. He realized - empirically! - that odd zeta values appear to be new (transcendental?) numbers. It is amazing to see how, a quarter of a millennium later, the numbers Euler played with, "however repugnant" this game might have seemed to his contemporary lovers of the "higher kind of calculus", reappeared in the analytic calculation of the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron, the most precisely calculated and measured physical quantity. Mathematicians, inspired by ideas of Grothendieck, are reviving the dream of Galois of uncovering a group structure in the ring of periods (that includes the multiple zeta values) - applied to the study of Feynman amplitudes.
Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.09553
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History of mathematics in the 18th century (01A50) Electromagnetic interaction; quantum electrodynamics (81V10) History of number theory (11-03) Multiple Dirichlet series and zeta functions and multizeta values (11M32)
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