Analytic and arithmetic methods in Liouville's identities

Abstract

The history of Liouville's identities is of remarkable interest especially as far as the methods used to prove them are concerned. In Liouville's opinion, the identities had to be proved by merely arithmetic considerations. Some mathematicians, such as Uspensky, developed Liouville's approach and used elementary methods. However, other mathematicians (among them Nazimoff and Bell) followed Hermite's suggestions of deriving Liouville's identities from the theory of elliptic functions: most of them thought that analytic methods were preferable since they allowed one to discover new identities (and not only to prove known ones).