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Guessing With Quadratic Differential Equations

By holonomic guessing, we denote the process of finding a linear differential equation with polynomial coefficients satisfied by the generating function of a sequence, for which only a few first terms are known. Holonomic guessing has been used in computer algebra for over three decades to demonstrate the value of the guess-and-prove paradigm in intuition processes preceding proofs, as propagated in The Art of Solving (Polya, 1978). Among the prominent packages used to perform guessing, one can cite the Maple Gfun package of Salvy and Zimmermann; the Mathematica GeneratingFunctions package of Mallinger; and the Sage ore_algebra package of Kauers, Jaroschek, and Johansson. We propose an approach that extends holonomic guessing by allowing the targeted differential equations to be of degree at most two. Consequently, it enables us to capture more generating functions than just holonomic functions. The corresponding recurrence equations are similar to known equations for the Bernoulli, Euler, and Bell numbers. As a result, our software finds the correct recurrence and differential equations for the generating functions of the up/down numbers (https://oeis.org/A000111), the evaluations of the zeta function at positive even integers, the Taylor coefficients of the Lambert W function, and many more. Our Maple implementation ($delta2guess$) is part of the FPS package which can be downloaded at http://www.mathematik.uni-kassel.de/~bteguia/FPS_webpage/FPS.htm