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### In "splendid isolation"

While browsing the Net for some articles related to the history of the Whittaker-Shannon sampling theorem, so important to our digital world today, I came across this passage by H. D. Luke in The ...
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### Why is the Gaussian so pervasive in mathematics?

This is a heuristic question that I think was once asked by Serge Lang. The gaussian: $e^{-x^2}$ appears as the fixed point to the Fourier transform, in the punchline to the central limit theorem, as ...
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### How does one motivate the analytic continuation of the Riemann zeta function?

I saw the functional equation and its proof for the Riemann zeta function many times, but usually the books start with, e.g. tricky change of variable of Gamma function or other seemingly unmotivated ...
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### Pochhammer symbol of a differential, and hypergeometric polynomials

I have a minor result which I'm sure has come up somewhere before but I can't seem to find it. Consider a confluent hypergeometric function of the form \newcommand{\ff}{{}_1F_1} \ff(b+k;b;z)\...
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### Cycling through the Zeta Garden: Zeta functions for graphs, cycle index polynomials, and determinants

Zeta functions abound in mathematics. Audrey Terras describes in Zeta Functions and Chaos three zeta functions--the zeta fct. of a projective non-singular algebraic variety; the Artin-Mazur zeta ...
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