New analogues of Clausen's identities arising from the theory of modular forms

Abstract

Around 1828, T. Clausen discovered that the square of certain hypergeometric (2)F(1) function can be expressed as a hypergeometric (3)F(2) function. Special cases of Clausen's identities were later used by S. Ramanujan in his derivation of 17 series for 1/pi. Since then, there were several attempts to find new analogues of Clausen's identities with the hope to derive new classes of series for 1/pi. Unfortunately, none were successful. In this article, we will present three new analogues of Clausen's identities. Their discovery is motivated by the study of relations between modular forms of weight 2 and modular functions associated with modular groups of genus 0. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.