In recent years there has been an increasing interest in problems
involving closed- form evaluations of (and representations of the
Riemann Zeta function at positive integer arguments as) various families
of series associated with the Riemann Zeta function ((s), the Hurwitz
Zeta function ((s, a), and their such extensions and generalizations as
(for example) Lerch's transcendent (or the Hurwitz-Lerch Zeta function)
iI>(z, s, a). Some of these developments have apparently stemmed from
an over two-century-old theorem of Christian Goldbach (1690-1764), which
was stated in a letter dated 1729 from Goldbach to Daniel Bernoulli
(1700-1782), from recent rediscoveries of a fairly rapidly convergent
series representation for ((3), which is actually contained in a 1772
paper by Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), and from another known series
representation for ((3), which was used by Roger Apery (1916-1994) in
1978 in his celebrated proof of the irrationality of ((3). This book is
motivated essentially by the fact that the theories and applications of
the various methods and techniques used in dealing with many different
families of series associated with the Riemann Zeta function and its
aforementioned relatives are to be found so far only"in widely scattered
journal articles. Thus our systematic (and unified) presentation of
these results on the evaluation and representation of the Zeta and
related functions is expected to fill a conspicuous gap in the existing
books dealing exclusively with these Zeta functions.