A short proof of Mathar's 2020 recurrence conjecture for the generalized-Stirling sequence A001711
Combinatorics
2026-05-13 v1
Abstract
For the OEIS sequence A001711, contributed by N. J. A. Sloane long before the on-line era and identified there as the diagonal of a generalized-Stirling triangle, R. J. Mathar contributed in February 2020 the conjectured order-2 P-recursive recurrence We give a one-page proof. Detlefs's harmonic-number closed form collapses the left-hand side, after dividing through by , to a polynomial identity of with coefficient . The harmonic-number coefficient simplifies to (using and ); the constant remainder is for the same reason. The supplementary archive contains a SymPy script verifying both pieces symbolically, the e.g.f.\ expansion against the harmonic closed form, and Mathar's recurrence numerically for .
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.11351,
title = {A short proof of Mathar's 2020 recurrence conjecture for the generalized-Stirling sequence A001711},
author = {Tong Niu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.11351},
year = {2026}
}
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8 pages