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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(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
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where is the Weierstrass zeta function and and are the invariants corresponding to the half-periods . The derivative of satisfies
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where is an Eisenstein series, and
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A special value is given by
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(OEIS A091343), where is the gamma function. Another special case is
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where is the plastic constant, denotes a polynomial root, and .
Letting be a root of unity, satisfies
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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
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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
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can be written
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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
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where
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and
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is a Dedekind sum (Apostol 1997, pp. 52-57), with the floor function.