Symbolic Summation of Multivariate Rational Functions

Symbolic summation as an active research topic of symbolic computation provides efficient algorithmic tools for evaluating and simplifying different types of sums arising from mathematics, computer science, physics and other areas. Most of existing algorithms in symbolic summation are mainly applicable to the problem with univariate inputs. A long-term project in symbolic computation is to develop theories, algorithms and software for the symbolic summation of multivariate functions. This paper will give complete solutions to two challenging problems in symbolic summation of multivariate rational functions, namely the rational summability problem and the existence problem of telescopers for multivariate rational functions. Our approach is based on the structure of Sato’s isotropy groups of polynomials, which enables us to reduce the problems to testing the shift equivalence of polynomials. Our results provide a complete solution to the discrete analogue of Picard’s problem on differential forms and can be used to detect the applicability of the Wilf-Zeilberger method to multivariate rational functions.