English

Rogers-Ramanujan and the Baker-Gammel-Wills (Pad\'e) conjecture

Classical Analysis and ODEs 2016-09-07 v1

Abstract

In 1961, Baker, Gammel and Wills conjectured that for functions ff meromorphic in the unit ball, a subsequence of its diagonal Pad\'{e} approximants converges uniformly in compact subsets of the ball omitting poles of ff. There is also apparently a cruder version of the conjecture due to Pad\'{e} himself, going back to the earlier twentieth century. We show here that for carefully chosen qq on the unit circle, the Rogers-Ramanujan continued fraction 1+qz1+q2z1+q3z1+...1+\frac{qz|}{|1}+\frac{q^{2}z|}{|1}+\frac{q^{3}z|}{|1}+... provides a counterexample to the conjecture. We also highlight some other interesting phenomena displayed by this fraction.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.math/0402305,
  title  = {Rogers-Ramanujan and the Baker-Gammel-Wills (Pad\'e) conjecture},
  author = {Doron S. Lubinsky},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:math/0402305},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

43 pages published version

R2 v1 2026-07-22T17:02:42.588Z