English

Streamlined WZ method proofs of Van Hamme supercongruences

Number Theory 2026-02-10 v3

Abstract

Using the WZ method to prove supercongruences critically depends on an inspired WZ pair choice. This paper demonstrates a procedure for finding WZ pair candidates to prove a given supercongruence. When suitable WZ pairs are thus obtained, coupling them with the pp-adic approximation of Γp\Gamma_p by Long and Ramakrishna enables uniform proofs for the Van Hamme supercongruences (B.2), (C.2), (D.2), (E.2), (F.2), (G.2), and (H.2). This approach also yields the known extensions of G.2 modulo p4p^4, and of H.2 modulo p3p^3 when pp is 33 modulo 44. Finally, the Van Hamme supercongruence (I.2) is shown to be a special case of the WZ method where Gosper's algorithm itself succeeds.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.00343,
  title  = {Streamlined WZ method proofs of Van Hamme supercongruences},
  author = {Andres Valloud},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.00343},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Delete references to equation (14) in the previous version (in Long-Ramakrishna the stated result has implicit hypotheses, and here a simpler argument suffices). Cosmetic typographical and text improvements

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:28:55.535Z