A note on some recent results for the Bernoulli numbers of the second kind

Blagouchine, Iaroslav V.

Journal of integer sequences, Tome 20 (2017) no. 3.

Résumé

Summary: 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.

Détail

Keywords: Bernoulli number of the second kind, gregory coefficient, Cauchy number, logarithmic number, Schröder, rediscovery, state of art, complex analysis, theory of complex variable, contour integration, residue theorem