Gosper’s strange series: A new, simplified proof and generalizations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1977, Gosper introduced a conjectural evaluation for a hypergeometric series that has been described as strange by a number of authors. In 2013, Ebisu proved Gosper’s conjecture using contiguity operators. Subsequently, in 2017, Chu provided another proof of Gosper’s conjecture, using a telescoping argument together with Pfaff’s transformation. In this article, we present a new and simplified proof of Gosper’s conjecture that is inequivalent to the previous proofs due to Ebisu and Chu. Our proof relies on an evaluation technique that was previously given by Campbell and Cantarini and that involves the modified Abel lemma on summation by parts. We also show how this method may be applied to prove generalizations and variants of Gosper’s summation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".