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Oct 31, 2013 at 22:49 comment added Urs Schreiber I think the crucial sentence in that article is this one (p. 917/(6 of 15)): "Within quantum theory it makes perfect sense to combine all the numbers into a single generating function In fact, this function has a straightforward physical interpretation. It can be seen as a probability amplitude for a string"
Sep 23, 2013 at 21:11 vote accept Brenin
Sep 21, 2013 at 17:26 comment added Brenin @VesselinDimitrov: the article you indicated to me is amazing. Thank you, I did not know it and it enlightened my morning.
Sep 21, 2013 at 0:44 comment added Vesselin Dimitrov Plainly, to paraphrase a line from an article (Geometry and physics, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 2010, highly recommended) by Atiyah, Dijkgraaf, and Hitchin, dualities in physics, including the one that underlies the enumeration formula you mention, are often [always?] "captured by a generating function that allows two different expansions." This is true of other mathematical formulas as well. In this way generating series are more than just a formal book keeping device for recurrence relations among coefficients. In any case they fully deserve to be called functions rather than power series.
Sep 20, 2013 at 22:41 answer added Colin McLarty timeline score: 2
Sep 20, 2013 at 21:56 comment added Qiaochu Yuan The obvious guess is that the entire series has some meaning, e.g. maybe it is the asymptotic expansion of some path integral or something.
Sep 20, 2013 at 21:36 answer added John Salvatierrez timeline score: 1
Sep 20, 2013 at 20:32 history asked Brenin CC BY-SA 3.0