History
The term "hypergeometric series" was first used by John Wallis in his 1655 book Arithmetica Infinitorum. Hypergeometric series were studied by Leonhard Euler, but the first full systematic treatment was given by Carl Friedrich Gauss (1813). Studies in the nineteenth century included those of Ernst Kummer (1836), and the fundamental characterisation by Bernhard Riemann of the hypergeometric function by means of the differential equation it satisfies. Riemann showed that the second-order differential equation for 2F1(z), examined in the complex plane, could be characterised (on the Riemann sphere) by its three regular singularities.
The cases where the solutions are algebraic functions were found by Hermann Schwarz (Schwarz's list).
Read more about this topic: Hypergeometric Function
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History takes time.... History makes memory.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)