Experimenting with Apery Limits and WZ pairs

Abstract

This article, dedicated with admiration in memory of Jon and Peter Borwein, illustrates by example, the power of experimental mathematics, so dear to them both, by experimenting with so-called Apery limits and WZ pairs. In particular we prove a weaker form of an intriguing conjecture of Marc Chamberland and Armin Straub (in an article dedicated to Jon Borwein), and generate lots of new Apery limits. We also rediscovered an infinite family of cubic irrationalities, that suggested very good effective irrationality measures (lower than Liouville's generic 3), and that seemed to go down to the optimal 2. It turned out this follows from known deep results in number theory, and a postscript by Paul Voutier outlines the proof. Nevertheless we believe that further experiments with our Maple packages will lead to new and interesting results.