Solutions for the General, Confluent and Biconfluent Heun equations and their connection with Abel equations

In a recent paper, the canonical forms of a new multi-parameter class of Abel differential equations, so-called AIR, all of whose members can be mapped into Riccati equations, were shown to be related to the differential equations for the hypergeometric 2F1, 1F1 and 0F1 functions. In this paper, a connection between the AIR canonical forms and the Heun General (GHE), Confluent (CHE) and Biconfluent (BHE) equations is presented. This connection fixes the value of one of the Heun parameters, expresses another one in terms of those remaining, and provides closed form solutions in terms of pFq functions for the resulting GHE, CHE and BHE, respectively depending on four, three and two irreducible parameters. This connection also turns evident what is the relation between the Heun parameters such that the solutions admit Liouvillian form, and suggests a mechanism for relating linear equations with N and N-1 singularities through the canonical forms of a non-linear equation of one order less.Comment: Original version submitted to Journal of Physics A: 16 pages, related to math.GM/0002059 and math-ph/0402040. Revised version according to referee's comments: 23 pages. Sign corrected (June/17) in formula (79). Second revised version (July/25): 25 pages. See also http://lie.uwaterloo.ca/odetools.ht