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
 |
(1)
|
or the integral
 |
(2)
|
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
 |
(24)
|
Lewin (1991) gives 67 dilogarithm identities (known as "ladders"), and Bailey and Broadhurst (1999, 2001) found the amazing additional dilogarithm identity
 |
(25)
|
where
is the largest positive root of the polynomial in Lehmer's Mahler measure problem and
is the Riemann zeta function.