LECTURE NOTES ON MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS Department of Physics, University of Bologna, Italy URL: www.fracalmo.org FRACTIONAL CALCULUS AND SPECIAL FUNCTIONS Francesco MAINARDI Department of Physics, University of Bologna, and INFN Via Irnerio 46, I{40126 Bologna, Italy.
[email protected] [email protected] Contents (pp. 1 { 62) Abstract . p. 1 A. Historical Notes and Introduction to Fractional Calculus . p. 2 B. The Liouville-Weyl Fractional Calculus . p. 8 C. The Riesz-Feller Fractional Calculus . p.12 D. The Riemann-Liouville Fractional Calculus . p.18 E. The Gr¨unwald-Letnikov Fractional Calculus . p.22 F. The Mittag-Leffler Functions . p.26 G. The Wright Functions . p.42 References . p.52 The present Lecture Notes are related to a Mini Course on Introduction to Fractional Calculus delivered by F. Mainardi, at BCAM, Bask Cen- tre for Applied Mathematics, in Bilbao, Spain on March 11-15, 2013, see http://www.bcamath.org/en/activities/courses. The treatment reflects the research activity of the Author carried out from the academic year 1993/94, mainly in collaboration with his students and with Rudolf Gorenflo, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the Freie Universt¨at,Berlin. ii Francesco MAINARDI c 2013 Francesco Mainardi FRACTIONAL CALCULUS AND SPECIAL FUNCTIONS 1 FRACTIONAL CALCULUS AND SPECIAL FUNCTIONS Francesco MAINARDI Department of Physics, University of Bologna, and INFN Via Irnerio 46, I{40126 Bologna, Italy.
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract The aim of these introductory lectures is to provide the reader with the essentials of the fractional calculus according to different approaches that can be useful for our applications in the theory of probability and stochastic processes.