Kam Cheong Au [‘Wilf–Zeilberger seeds and non-trivial hypergeometric series’, Journal of Symbolic Computation 130 (2025), Article no. 102241] discovered a powerful methodology for finding new Wilf–Zeilberger (WZ) pairs. He calls it WZ seeds and gives numerous examples of applications to proving longstanding conjectural identities for reciprocal powers of $\pi $ and their duals for Dirichlet L-values. In this note, we explain how a modification of Au’s WZ pairs together with a classical analytic argument yields simpler proofs of these results. We illustrate our method with examples elaborated with assistance of Maple code that we have developed.

In 2011, Guillera [‘A new Ramanujan-like series for $1/\pi ^2$’, Ramanujan J. 26 (2011), 369–374] introduced a remarkable rational ${}_{7}F_{6}( \frac {27}{64} )$-series for ${1}/{\pi ^2}$ using the Wilf–Zeilberger (WZ) method, and Chu and Zhang later proved this evaluation using an acceleration method based on Dougall’s ${}_{5}F_{4}$-sum. Another proof of Guillera’s ${}_{7}F_{6}( \frac {27}{64} )$-series was given by Guillera in 2018, and this subsequent proof used a recursive argument involving Dougall’s sum together with the WZ method. Subsequently, Chen and Chu introduced a q-analogue of Guillera’s ${}_{7}F_{6}( \frac {27}{64} )$-series. The many past research articles concerning Guillera’s ${}_{7}F_{6}( \frac {27}{64} )$-series for ${1}/{\pi ^2}$ naturally lead to questions about similar results for other mathematical constants. We apply a WZ-based acceleration method to prove new rational ${}_{7}F_{6}( \frac {27}{64} )$- and ${}_{6}F_{5}( \frac {27}{64} )$-series for $\sqrt {2}$.

For an (irreducible) recurrence equation with coefficients from $\mathbb Z[n]$ and its two linearly independent rational solutions $u_n,v_n$, the limit of $u_n/v_n$ as $n\to \infty $, when it exists, is called the Apéry limit. We give a construction that realises certain quotients of L-values of elliptic curves as Apéry limits.

In a recent study of how the output voltage of a Hall plate is affected by the shape of the plate and the size of its contacts, U. Ausserlechner has come up with a remarkable double integral that can be viewed as a generalisation of the classical elliptic ‘arithmetic–geometric mean (AGM)’ integral. Here we discuss transformation properties of the integral, which were experimentally observed by Ausserlechner, as well as its analytical and arithmetic features including connections with modular forms.

In this paper we present new explicit simultaneous rational approximations which converge subexponentially to the values of the Bell polynomials at the points where m=1,2,…,a, a∈ℕ, γ is Euler’s constant and ζ is the Riemann zeta function.