The dilogarithm is a special case of the polylogarithm for . Note that the notation is unfortunately similar to that for the logarithmic integral . There are also two different commonly encountered normalizations for the function, both denoted , and one of which is known as the Rogers L-function.
The dilogarithm is implemented in Mathematica as PolyLog[2, z].
The dilogarithm can be defined by the sum
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(1)
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or the integral
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(2)
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Plots of in the complex plane are illustrated above.
The major functional equations for the dilogarithm are given by
A complete list of which can be evaluated in closed form is given by
where is the golden ratio (Lewin 1981, Bailey et al. 1997; Borwein et al. 2001).
There are several remarkable identities involving the dilogarithm function. Ramanujan gave the identities
(Berndt 1994, Gordon and McIntosh 1997) in addition to the identity for , and Bailey et al. (1997) showed that
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(24)
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Lewin (1991) gives 67 dilogarithm identities (known as "ladders"), and Bailey and Broadhurst (1999, 2001) found the amazing additional dilogarithm identity
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(25)
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where is the largest positive root of the polynomial in Lehmer's Mahler measure problem and is the Riemann zeta function.