The membership problem for hypergeometric sequences with rational parameters

We investigate the Membership Problem for hypergeometric sequences: given a hypergeometric sequence ❬un❭∞n=0 of rational numbers and a target t∈Q, decide whether t occurs in the sequence. We show decidability of this problem under the assumption that in the defining recurrence p(n)un = q(n)un-1, the...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Nosan, K, Pouly, A, Shirmohammadi, M, Worrell, J
Format: Conference item
Language:English
Published: Association for Computing Machinery 2022
Description
Summary:We investigate the Membership Problem for hypergeometric sequences: given a hypergeometric sequence ❬un❭∞n=0 of rational numbers and a target t∈Q, decide whether t occurs in the sequence. We show decidability of this problem under the assumption that in the defining recurrence p(n)un = q(n)un-1, the roots of the polynomials p(x) and q(x) are all rational numbers. Our proof relies on bounds on the density of primes in arithmetic progressions. We also observe a relationship between the decidability of the Membership problem (and variants) and the Rohrlich-Lang conjecture in transcendence theory.