Legendre modified moments for Euler's constant

Polynomial moments are often used for the computation of Gauss quadrature to stabilize the numerical calculation of the orthogonal polynomials, see [W. Gautschi, Computational aspects of orthogonal polynomials, in: P. Nevai (Ed.), Orthogonal Polynomials-Theory and Practice, NATO ASI Series, Series C: Mathematical and Physical Sciences, vol. 294. Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1990, pp. 181-216 [6]; W. Gautschi, On the sensitivity of orthogonal polynomials to perturbations in the moments, Numer. Math. 48(4) (1986) 369-382 [5]; W. Gautschi, On generating orthogonal polynomials, SIAM J. Sci. Statist. Comput. 3(3) (1982) 289-317 [4]] or numerical resolution of linear systems [C. Brezinski, Pade-type approximation and general orthogonal polynomials, ISNM, vol. 50, Basel, Boston, Stuttgart, Birkhauser, 1980 [3]]. These modified moments can also be used to accelerate the convergence of sequences to a real or complex numbers if the error satisfies some properties as done in [C. Brezinski, Acceleration de la convergence en analyse numerique, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, vol. 584. Springer, Berlin, New York, 1977; M. Prevost, Pade-type approximants with orthogonal generating polynomials, J. Comput. Appl. Math. 9(4) (1983) 333-346]. In this paper, we use Legendre modified moments to accelerate the convergence of the sequence H-n - log(n + 1) to the Eulor's constant gamma. A formula for the error is given. It is proved that it is a totally monotonic sequence. At last. we give applications to the arithmetic property of gamma. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.