A Note on Some Recent Results for the Bernoulli Numbers of the Second Kind
Iaroslav V. Blagouchine
SeaTech
University of Toulon
Avenue de l’Université
83957 La Garde
France
and
Steklov Institute of Mathematics at St. Petersburg
27 Fontanka
191023 St. Petersburg
Russia
Abstract:
In a recent issue of the Bulletin of the Korean Mathematical Society,
Qi and Zhang discovered an interesting integral representation for the
Bernoulli numbers of the second kind (also known as
Gregory's coefficients,
Cauchy numbers of the first kind, and the reciprocal
logarithmic numbers). The same representation also appears in many
other sources, either with no references to its author, or with
references to various modern researchers. In this short note, we show
that this representation is a rediscovery of an old result obtained in
the 19th century by Ernst Schröder. We also demonstrate that the same
integral representation may be readily derived by means of complex
integration. Moreover, we discovered that the asymptotics of these
numbers were also the subject of several rediscoveries, including very
recent ones. In particular, the first-order asymptotics, which are
usually (and erroneously) credited to Johan F. Steffensen, actually
date back to the mid-19th century, and probably were known even
earlier.
Full version: pdf,
dvi,
ps,
latex
(Concerned with sequences
A002206
A002207
A002657
A002790
A075266
A195189
A262235.)
Received December 20 2016; revised versions received January 24 2017; January 25 2017; January 26 2017.
Published in Journal of Integer Sequences, January 27 2017.
Return to
Journal of Integer Sequences home page