Decision Problems for Second-Order Holonomic Recurrences

We study decision problems for sequences which obey a second-order holonomic recurrence of the form f(n + 2) = P(n) f(n + 1) + Q(n) f(n) with rational polynomial coefficients, where P is non-constant, Q is non-zero, and the degree of Q is smaller than or equal to that of P. We show that existence of infinitely many zeroes is decidable. We give partial algorithms for deciding the existence of a zero, positivity of all sequence terms, and positivity of all but finitely many sequence terms. If Q does not have a positive integer zero then our algorithms halt on almost all initial values (f(1), f(2)) for the recurrence. We identify a class of recurrences for which our algorithms halt for all initial values. We further identify a class of recurrences for which our algorithms can be extended to total ones

Hypergeometric-type sequences

We introduce hypergeometric-type sequences. They are linear combinations of interlaced hypergeometric sequences (of arbitrary interlacements). We prove that they form a subring of the ring of holonomic sequences. An interesting family of sequences in this class are those defined by trigonometric functions with linear arguments in the index and π, such as Chebyshev polynomials, sin2 (n π/4) · cos (n π/6))n , and compositions like (sin (cos(nπ/3)π))n . We describe an algorithm that computes a hypergeometric-type normal form of a given holonomic nth term whenever it exists. Our implementation enables us to generate several identities for terms defined via trigonometric function

Computer Science for Continuous Data:Survey, Vision, Theory, and Practice of a Computer Analysis System

Building on George Boole's work, Logic provides a rigorous foundation for the powerful tools in Computer Science that underlie nowadays ubiquitous processing of discrete data, such as strings or graphs. Concerning continuous data, already Alan Turing had applied "his" machines to formalize and study the processing of real numbers: an aspect of his oeuvre that we transform from theory to practice.The present essay surveys the state of the art and envisions the future of Computer Science for continuous data: natively, beyond brute-force discretization, based on and guided by and extending classical discrete Computer Science, as bridge between Pure and Applied Mathematics

Termination Conditions for Positivity Proving Procedures

Proving positivity of a sequence given by a linear recurrence with polynomial coefficients (P-finite recurrence) is a non-trivial task for both humans and computers. Algorithms dealing with this task are rare or non-existent. One method that was introduced in the last decade by Gerhold and Kauers succeeds on many examples, but termination of this procedure has been proven so far only up to order three for special cases. Here we present an analysis that extends the previously known termination results on recurrences of order three, and also provides termination conditions for recurrences of higher order