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The Dedekind eta function is defined over the upper half-plane
by
(1)
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(2)
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(3)
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(4)
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(5)
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(6)
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(OEIS A010815), where is the square of the nome
,
is the half-period ratio,
and
is a q-series (Weber 1902, pp. 85 and 112;
Atkin and Morain 1993; Berndt 1994, p. 139).
The Dedekind eta function is implemented in the Wolfram Language as DedekindEta[tau].
Rewriting the definition in terms of explicitly in terms of the half-period
ratio
gives the product
(7)
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It is illustrated above in the complex plane.
is a modular form first introduced by Dedekind in
1877, and is related to the modular discriminant
of the Weierstrass elliptic function
by
(8)
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(Apostol 1997, p. 47).
A compact closed form for the derivative is given by
(9)
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where
is the Weierstrass zeta function and
and
are the invariants corresponding to the half-periods
. The derivative of
satisfies
(10)
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where
is an Eisenstein series, and
(11)
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A special value is given by
(12)
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(13)
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(OEIS A091343), where is the gamma function.
Another special case is
(14)
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(15)
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(16)
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where
is the plastic constant,
denotes a polynomial
root, and
.
Letting
be a root of unity,
satisfies
(17)
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(18)
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(19)
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where
is an integer (Weber 1902, p. 113; Atkin and Morain 1993; Apostol 1997, p. 47).
The Dedekind eta function is related to the Jacobi
theta function
by
(20)
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(Weber 1902, Vol. 3, p. 112) and
(21)
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(Apostol 1997, p. 91).
Macdonald (1972) has related most expansions of the form to affine root
systems. Exceptions not included in Macdonald's treatment include
, found by Hecke and Rogers,
, found by Ramanujan, and
, found by Atkin (Leininger and Milne 1999). Using the Dedekind
eta function, the Jacobi triple product identity
(22)
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can be written
(23)
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(Jacobi 1829, Hardy and Wright 1979, Hirschhorn 1999, Leininger and Milne 1999).
Dedekind's functional equation states that if , where
is the modular group
Gamma,
,
and
(where
is the upper half-plane), then
(24)
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where
(25)
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and
(26)
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is a Dedekind sum (Apostol 1997, pp. 52-57), with
the floor function.