Lucy Joan Slater (5 January 1922 – 6 June 2008) was a British mathematician whose research focused on special functions, basic hypergeometric series and q-series. Over a long publishing career she produced papers, reference compilations and books that have remained useful to researchers working with mathematical series and identities.
Areas of work and mathematical themes
Slater studied families of functions and infinite series that arise in analysis, number theory and combinatorics. Her work dealt particularly with transformations and identities for generalized and basic hypergeometric series, an area that connects to classical special functions and to q-analogues of many formulas. Many identities and transformation formulas in this field are attributed to, or organized by, her.
Notable identities and compilations
She is associated with several named identities and lists of identities that bear her name in combination with earlier authors—examples include the Jackson–Slater type relations and the Rogers–Ramanujan–Slater family of identities. Slater compiled and systematized many Rogers–Ramanujan–type formulas, producing a reference that later authors consult when working with partition identities and q-series. Her lists and derivations are often cited in contemporary expositions of these topics.
Publications and books
In addition to research articles, Slater wrote at least one influential monograph on generalized hypergeometric functions that has been used by analysts and physicists as a reference. She also authored a practical book on programming in Fortran aimed at facilitating numerical work with special functions and computations. These publications reflect both theoretical and computational aspects of her interests and provided tools for subsequent work in applied mathematics.
Historical context and influence
Active in the mid‑20th century, Slater contributed during a period when the theory of special functions and q-series was being expanded and connected to other branches of mathematics. Her systematic approach to identities helped make an extensive literature more accessible, and her compilations continue to be useful to researchers proving or discovering new relations among series.
Further reading
- Overview of mathematical functions and special-function literature: mathematical functions.
- Information about her practical programming text and computational approaches: Fortran and numerical work.
Legacy: Lucy J. Slater is remembered for bringing order to a complex area of identities and for producing resources that bridge theoretical analysis and computation. Her name remains attached to several formulas and reference compilations still consulted by specialists in q-series and special functions.