In Praise of an Elementary Identity of Euler Gaurav Bhatnagar Educomp Solutions Ltd.
[email protected] June 7, 2011 Dedicated to S. B. Ekhad and D. Zeilberger Abstract We survey the applications of an elementary identity used by Euler in one of his proofs of the Pentagonal Number Theorem. Using a suitably reformulated ver- sion of this identity that we call Euler's Telescoping Lemma, we give alternate proofs of all the key summation theorems for terminating Hypergeometric Series and Basic Hypergeometric Series, including the terminating Binomial Theorem, the Chu{Vandermonde sum, the Pfaff–Saalsch¨utzsum, and their q-analogues. We also give a proof of Jackson's q-analog of Dougall's sum, the sum of a terminating, bal- anced, very-well-poised 8φ7 sum. Our proofs are conceptually the same as those obtained by the WZ method, but done without using a computer. We survey iden- tities for Generalized Hypergeometric Series given by Macdonald, and prove several identities for q-analogs of Fibonacci numbers and polynomials and Pell numbers that have appeared in combinatorial contexts. Some of these identities appear to be new. arXiv:1102.0659v3 [math.CO] 12 Jun 2011 Keywords: Telescoping, Fibonacci Numbers, Pell Numbers, Derangements, Hy- pergeometric Series, Fibonacci Polynomials, q-Fibonacci Numbers, q-Pell numbers, Basic Hypergeometric Series, q-series, Binomial Theorem, q-Binomial Theorem, Chu{Vandermonde sum, q-Chu{Vandermonde sum, Pfaff–Saalsch¨utzsum, q-Pfaff– Saalsch¨utzsum, q-Dougall summation, very-well-poised 6φ5 sum, Generalized Hy- pergeometric Series, WZ Method. MSC2010: Primary 33D15; Secondary 11B39, 33C20, 33F10, 33D65 1 1 Introduction One of the first results in q-series is Euler's 1740 expansion of the product (1 − q)(1 − q2)(1 − q3)(1 − q4) ··· into a power series in q.