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The gamma function then is defined in the complex plane as the analytic continuation of this integral function: it is a meromorphic function which is holomorphic except at zero and the negative integers, where it has simple poles. The gamma function has no zeros, so the reciprocal gamma function 1 / Γ(z) is an entire function.
The gamma function is an important special function in mathematics.Its particular values can be expressed in closed form for integer and half-integer arguments, but no simple expressions are known for the values at rational points in general.
as the only positive function f , with domain on the interval x > 0, that simultaneously has the following three properties: f (1) = 1, and f (x + 1) = x f (x) for x > 0 and f is logarithmically convex. A treatment of this theorem is in Artin's book The Gamma Function, [4] which has been reprinted by the AMS in a collection of Artin's writings.
The roots of the digamma function are the saddle points of the complex-valued gamma function. Thus they lie all on the real axis. The only one on the positive real axis is the unique minimum of the real-valued gamma function on R + at x 0 = 1.461 632 144 968 362 341 26.... All others occur single between the poles on the negative axis:
The reciprocal is sometimes used as a starting point for numerical computation of the gamma function, and a few software libraries provide it separately from the regular gamma function. Karl Weierstrass called the reciprocal gamma function the "factorielle" and used it in his development of the Weierstrass factorization theorem.
The Gamma function can be defined for any complex value in the plane if we evaluate the integral along the Hankel contour. The Hankel contour is especially useful for expressing the Gamma function for any complex value because the end points of the contour vanish, and thus allows the fundamental property of the Gamma function to be satisfied ...
Thus computing the gamma function becomes a matter of evaluating only a small number of elementary functions and multiplying by stored constants. The Lanczos approximation was popularized by Numerical Recipes , according to which computing the gamma function becomes "not much more difficult than other built-in functions that we take for granted ...
Interpolated approximations and bounds are all of the form ~ () + (~ ()) where ~ is an interpolating function running monotonially from 0 at low α to 1 at high α, approximating an ideal, or exact, interpolator (): = () () For the simplest interpolating function considered, a first-order rational function ~ = + the tightest lower bound has ...