Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

Numerical instability of pFq((1, 1, 1), (2, 2), x) in HypergeometricFunctions 0.3.17

Open
#65 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
julia
Domain
backend

Research direction

Run the Julia reproducer from the issue with HypergeometricFunctions 0.3.17 and inspect the plotted values of x*pFq((1, 1, 1), (2, 2), x) against the dilogarithm. Trace the numerical evaluation path for this parameter set and verify that the corrected result has no spurious poles and that its real part is continuous for arguments greater than 1.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Dear HypergeometricFunctions developers,

I was comparing the function x*pFq((1, 1, 1), (2, 2), x) with the dilogarithm and noticed multiple numerical instabilities in version 0.3.17.

To reproduce:

using HypergeometricFunctions, Plots

dilog(x) = real(x * pFq((1, 1, 1), (2, 2), x))

plot(range(-1e3, 1e4, length = 1000), dilog)

Please find the output plot below. The shown function has multiple (pseudo-)poles, which should not be there (the real part of the dilogarithm is continuous for arguments greater than 1).

dilog

Dominant language
Julia
Stars
76
Forks
12
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Getting set up

We have not checked this project's setup files yet. Start from its README, and see our first-contribution guide for the general steps.

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from JuliaMath/HypergeometricFunctions.jl

All issues in JuliaMath/HypergeometricFunctions.jl

Similar issues

More Julia issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.