The Membership Problem for Hypergeometric Sequences with Rational Parameters

Abstract

We investigate the Membership Problem for hypergeometric sequences: given a hypergeometric sequence ❬un❭∞n=0 of rational numbers and a target t∈Q, decide whether t occurs in the sequence. We show decidability of this problem under the assumption that in the defining recurrence p(n)un = q(n)un-1, the roots of the polynomials p(x) and q(x) are all rational numbers. Our proof relies on bounds on the density of primes in arithmetic progressions. We also observe a relationship between the decidability of the Membership problem (and variants) and the Rohrlich-Lang conjecture in transcendence theory.