Question: concerning the identify command / master theorem

Greetings to all.

At the following Math.Stackexchange Discussion a certain constant was computed in relation to a Master Theorem Type recurrence being solved. This prompted me to try to identify it by the use of the eponymous command. What follows is the content of the Maple session. You may want to read the post in order to get an understanding of what the constant means and how its exact value is calculated.

> fsolve(2/2^a+1/4^a=1, a);
                                   1.271553303

> identify(%);
                                   1.271553303

> identify(%,all);
                                 1/2    1/2
                              2 2      3
                      arcsech(------ + ---- - 1/6 Zeta(5))
                                7       6

> evalf(log[2](1+sqrt(2)));
                                   1.271553303

My questions/observations are:

  • Why does the algorithm fail to spot as simple a constant as the one above or am I just not invoking it correctly?
  • If that last formula were true the author of this code would certainly win a prize for calculating a closed form expression for an odd integer zeta function value! (To be fair here I did notice that the spurious identification disappears when the number of working digits is increased and I do understand that the identification depends critically on the number of digits.)

In concluding I would like to say, why the complicated formula and not the simple one? Let me congratulate you just the same on providing this very useful command. I have worked on pandigital approximations which are slightly related and I understand that adding an operation like the logarithm to an integer base up to some max base value can dramatically increase the search space and may not always be feasible.

Best regards,

Marko Riedel

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