Today I studied
genera,
which provide a way to produce toopological invariants of manifolds.
Genera are intimately related to invertible power series which start with 1+⋯.
For example the common genus L-genus belongs to the power series of
tanh(x)x.
The so called Â-genus looks even more intimidating, it belongs to the
power series of
tanh(x/2)x/2.
So this leaves the question: Why are those functions above analytic?
Formally, they are not even defined at x=0, because you end up
with 00.
Nevertheless both functions are indeed defined at x=0, and both
are analytic, meaning that you can write them as a power series
k=0∑∞ckxk
for certain coefficients ck.
I want to explain how to derive the power series representation, i.e.
how to compute the ck for both series.
Let's start with unrolling the definitions:
tanh(x)=cosh(x)sinh(x),
and cosh and sinh are defined by
sinh=21(ex−e−x) and cosh=21(ex+e−x).
Using the well-known series expansion of ex, we can write
sinh=21(k=0∑∞k!xk−k=0∑∞(−1)kk!xk)=21(k∑(2k+1)!x2k+1)
and
cosh=21(k=0∑∞k!xk+k=0∑∞(−1)kk!xk)=21(k∑(2k)!x2k).
The next stop is to compute the