Mathematical notation evolves like all languages do. As new experiments are made, we sometimes witness the survival of the fittest, sometimes the survival of the most familiar. A healthy conservatism keeps things from changing too rapidly; a healthy radicalism keeps things in tune with new theoretical emphases. Our mathematical language continues to improve, just as “the d-ism of Leibniz overtook the dotage of Newton ” in past centuries [4, Chapter 4]. In 1970 I began teaching a class at Stanford University entitled Concrete Mathematics. The students and I studied how to manipulate formulas in continuous and discrete mathematics, and the problems we investigated were often inspired by new developments in computer science. As the years went by we began to see that a few changes in notational traditions would greatly facilitate our work. The notes from that class have recently been published in a book [15], and as I wrote the final drafts of that book I learned to my surprise that two of the notations we had been using were considerably more useful than I had previously realized. The ideas “clicked ” so well, in fact, that I’ve decided to write this article, blatantly attempting to promote these notations among the mathematicians who have no use for [15]. I hope that within five years everybody will be able to use these notations in published papers without needing to explain what they mean.

The theory of the incomplete gamma functions, as part of the theory of conuent hypergeometric functions, has received its rst systematic exposition by Tricomi in the early 1950s. His own contributions, as well as further advances made thereafter, are surveyed here with particular emphasis on asymptotic expansions, zeros, inequalities, computational methods, and applications.

Abstract not found

Completely monotonic functions of positive order and asymptotic expansions of the logarithm of Barnes double gamma function and Euler’s gamma function