Other versions of several of the identities in this subsection can be constructed with the aid of the operator identity
See Erdélyi et al. (1953a, pp. 102–103).
The six functions
,
,
are said to be contiguous to
.
By repeated applications of (15.5.11)–(15.5.18) any
function
, in which
are integers, can be
expressed as a linear combination of
and any one of
its contiguous functions, with coefficients that are rational functions of
, and
.
An equivalent equation to the hypergeometric differential equation (15.10.1) is
Further contiguous relations include: