English

Legendre duality for certain summations over the Farey pairs

General Mathematics 2025-08-25 v5

Abstract

Each irreducible fraction p/q>0p/q>0 corresponds to a primitive vector (p,q)Z2(p,q)\in\mathbb Z^2 with positive coordinates. Such a vector (p,q)(p,q) can be uniquely written as the sum of two primitive vectors (a,b),(c,d)Z02(a,b),(c,d)\in\mathbb Z_{\geq 0}^2 spanning a parallelogram of oriented area one. We present new summation formulas over the set of such parallelograms. These formulas depend explicitly on a,b,c,da,b,c,d and thus define a summation over primitive vectors (p,q)=(a+c,b+d)(p,q)=(a+c,b+d) indirectly. Equivalently, these sums may be interpreted as running over Farey pairs, i.e. pairs of fractions 0c/d<a/b10\leq c/d<a/b\leq 1 satisfying adbc=1ad-bc=1. The input for our formulas is the graph of a strictly concave function gg. The terms are the areas of certain triangles formed by tangents to the graph of gg. Several of these formulas for different gg yield values involving π\pi. For gg a parabola we recover the classical Mordell-Tornheim series (also called the Witten series). As a nice application we also discuss formulas for continued fractions for an arbitrary real number α\alpha involving coefficients of the continued fraction and the differences between the convergents and α\alpha. Using Hata's work, we show that the terms in the above formulas are the coefficients of the Legendre transform of gg in a certain Schauder basis, allowing us to interpret our formulas as Parseval-type identities. We hope that the Legendre duality sheds new light on Hata's approach. Raising the terms in the above summation formula to the power ss we obtain a function Fg(s)F_g(s). We prove that for a strictly concave gg, the function Fg(s)F_g(s) converges for s>2/3s>2/3 and diverges at s=2/3s=2/3.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.10592,
  title  = {Legendre duality for certain summations over the Farey pairs},
  author = {Nikita Kalinin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.10592},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

corrected typos, improved text, added discussion section, open directions