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My Problem

I'm trying to solve problems from old qualifying exams in complex analysis and right now I'm stuck on the following exercise.

Compute the complex integral

$$ \int_{\gamma} e^{\frac{1}{z^2 - 1}}\sin{\pi z} \,\mathrm dz $$

where $\gamma$ is a closed curve in the right half plane that has index $N$ with respect to the point $1$.


My attempt

By the Residue theorem, since the function $f(z) := e^{\frac{1}{z^2 - 1}}\sin{\pi z}$ has only an isolated singularity at $z = 1$ in the right half plane, which in this case is an essential singularity, we can compute the integral by finding the residue at $1$, more precisely

$$ \int_{\gamma} e^{\frac{1}{z^2 - 1}}\sin{\pi z} \, \mathrm dz = 2\pi i N \operatorname{Res}{(f(z); 1)} $$

where the $N$ comes from the assumption on the index of the curve.

Now my problem is that I can't compute this residue. The "obvious" things that I have tried are finding the Laurent expansions of the functions $e^{\frac{1}{z^2 - 1}}$ and $\sin{\pi z}$ around $z = 1$. It is easy to find that

$$ \sin{\pi z} = -\frac{\pi}{1!}(z - 1) + \frac{\pi^3}{3!}(z - 1)^3 -\frac{\pi^5}{5!}(z - 1)^5 + \frac{\pi^7}{7!}(z - 1)^7 + \cdots $$

Then I tried doing the following with the exponential:

$$ e^{\frac{1}{z^2 - 1}} = \sum_{n = 0}^{\infty}\frac{1}{n!}\frac{1}{(z^2 - 1)^n} $$

and I thought that maybe then expressing the fraction $\frac{1}{z^2 - 1}$ as

$$ \frac{1}{z^2 - 1} = \frac{1}{2} \left ( \frac{1}{z-1} - \frac{1}{z+1} \right ) $$

and using the Laurent expansion

$$ \frac{1}{z+ 1} = \frac{1}{z - 1 + 2} = \frac{1}{2}\frac{1}{1 + \frac{z - 1}{2}} = \frac{1}{2} \sum_{n = 0}^{\infty}\frac{(z - 1)^n}{2^n} $$

could be of help.

But now I don't see much hope of this working because I would have to put this last infinite series back into the series for the exponential and there's an $n$-th power there, and finally to top it all I would have to multiply by the Laurent series for the $\sin{\pi z}$ to try to get a hold of the coefficient of $\frac{1}{z - 1}$.


I would really appreciate any help with this. Thanks.

  • 4
    +1 for such a neatly posed question.2012-08-04
  • 0
    just out of interest, what is the solution to this problem (if known)?2016-09-09

1 Answers 1