General formulas for a class of Euler sums

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient algorithm to compute explicit closed-form evaluations of Euler sums involving harmonic numbers, expressed through digamma and polygamma functions, and provides formulas for sums with various denominators.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel, easy-to-implement method for deriving closed-form formulas for a broad class of Euler sums, including sums with rational functions and multiple denominator terms.

Findings

Provides explicit formulas for sums with one or two denominator terms up to power 3.

Reduces complex Euler sum computations to partial fraction decomposition.

Enables high-precision numerical verification of the formulas.

Abstract

Let $H_k = 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + \cdots + 1/k$ denote the $k$th harmonic number. We present an easy-to-implement algorithm for the computation of explicit closed-form evaluations, in terms of the digamma and polygamma functions, for Euler sums of the form \begin{align} \sum_{k=1}^\infty R(k) H_k, \end{align} where $R(k)$ is a rational function (quotient of two polynomials) whose denominator degree is at least two larger than the numerator degree. We apply the same method to show how the computation of a general formula for Euler sums of the form \begin{align*} \sum_{k=1}^\infty \frac{H_k}{(m_1 k + n_1)^{p_1} (m_2 k + n_2)^{p_2} \cdots (m_r k + n_r)^{p_r}} \end{align*} reduces to partial fraction decomposition. We present explicit formulae for sums with one or two terms in the denominator, with powers $p_i$ ranging up to 3, and with multipliers $m_i$ ranging up to 4. We also include results for related Euler sums such as \begin{align*} \sum_{k=1}^\infty \frac{k^q H_k}{(m k + n)^p}. \end{align*} Computation of Euler sums directly to very high precision enables us to rigorously check the above-mentioned formulas in many specific cases.