Asymptotic Behaviors of Hankelians, Whose Entries Involve Regularly- or Rapidly-Varying Functions, as the Variable Tends to +∞. Part I

Abstract

The rich literature concerning “asymptotic behavior of Hankel determinants” concerns the behavior, as the order n tends to ∞, of Hankel determinants whose entries are numbers, e.g., with a combinatorial interest or arising as values of special classes of functions. Such determinants are numbers depending on n , playing roles in number theory, combinatorics, random matrices and the like; and mathematicians in the involved fields have been interested in their asymptotic behaviors as n goes to ∞, as previously mentioned, with no single exception to the author’s knowledge. The study carried on in the present paper treats an altogether different situation as suggested by the specification in the title “ as the variable tends to +∞ ” . We deal with those types of Hankel determinants (purposely called Hankelians) which are special cases of Wronskians and, continuing our work on the asymptotics of Wronskians, we study the asymptotic behaviors of n -order Hankelians, whose entries involve either regularly- or rapidly-varying functions, when the variable tends to +∞. As in the study of Wronskians, the treatment of this case also needs the whole apparatus of the theory of higher-order types of asymptotic variation, but the most demanding results are not automatic corollaries of the general theory. In fact, in the study of generic Wronskians (study motivated by applications to asymptotic expansions), the entries were required to belong to one of the classes of “higher-order regular or rapid variation”; on the contrary, in the case of Hankelians, we are confronted with functions whose logarithms are either “regularly- or rapidly-varying functions”, roughly classifiable as “ultrarapidly-varying functions”, and the study requires both special devices and a number of preliminary lemmas about products and linear combinations of functions in the mentioned classes.