English

Experimenting with Apery Limits and WZ pairs

Number Theory 2021-09-21 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

This article, dedicated with admiration in memory of Jon and Peter Borwein, illustrates by example, the power of experimental mathematics, so dear to them both, by experimenting with so-called Apery limits and WZ pairs. In particular we prove a weaker form of an intriguing conjecture of Marc Chamberland and Armin Straub (in an article dedicated to Jon Borwein), and generate lots of new Apery limits. We also rediscovered an infinite family of cubic irrationalities, that suggested very good effective irrationality measures (lower than Liouville's generic 3), and that seemed to go down to the optimal 2. It turned out this follows from known deep results in number theory, and a postscript by Paul Voutier outlines the proof. Nevertheless we believe that further experiments with our Maple packages will lead to new and interesting results.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2109.05359,
  title  = {Experimenting with Apery Limits and WZ pairs},
  author = {Robert Dougherty-Bliss and Doron Zeilberger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.05359},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

11 pages. Accompanied by three Maple packages and numerous output files available from https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/mamarim/mamarimhtml/wzp.html ; In fond memory of Jon and Peter Borwein. This version contains a postscript by Paul Voutier

R2 v1 2026-06-24T05:53:08.679Z