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arXiv · 2108.06586

The birthday boy problem

Wadim Zudilin
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Abstract

In their recent preprint arXiv:2101.08308, Robert Dougherty-Bliss, Christoph Koutschan and Doron Zeilberger come up with a powerful strategy to prove the irrationality, in a quantitative form, of some numbers that are given as multiple integrals or quotients of such. What is really missing there, for many examples given, is an explicit identification of those irrational numbers; the authors comment on this task, "The output file [...] contains many such conjectured evaluations, (very possibly many of them are equivalent via a hypergeometric transformation rule) and we challenge [...], the birthday boy, or anyone else, to prove them." Without an identification, the numbers are hardly appealing to human (number theorists). The goal of this note is to outline a strategy to do the job and illustrate it on several promising entries discussed in the preprint above.

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Wadim Zudilin. 2021-08-14. The birthday boy problem. https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.06586

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