Ramanujan’s function k(τ)=r(τ)r 2(2τ) and its modularity

Abstract

Abstract We study the modularity of Ramanujan’s function k ( τ ) = r ( τ ) r 2 ( 2 τ ) k(\tau )=r(\tau ){r}^{2}(2\tau ) , where r ( τ ) r(\tau ) is the Rogers-Ramanujan continued fraction. We first find the modular equation of k ( τ ) k(\tau ) of “an” level, and we obtain some symmetry relations and some congruence relations which are satisfied by the modular equations; these relations are quite useful for reduction of the computation cost for finding the modular equations. We also show that for some τ \tau in an imaginary quadratic field, the value k ( τ ) k(\tau ) generates the ray class field over an imaginary quadratic field modulo 10; this is because the function k is a generator of the field of the modular function on Γ 1 ( 10 ) {{\mathrm{\Gamma}}}_{1}(10) . Furthermore, we suggest a rather optimal way of evaluating the singular values of k ( τ ) k(\tau ) using the modular equations in the following two ways: one is that if j ( τ ) j(\tau ) is the elliptic modular function, then one can explicitly evaluate the value k ( τ ) k(\tau ) , and the other is that once the value k ( τ ) k(\tau ) is given, we can obtain the value k ( r τ ) k(r\tau ) for any positive rational number r immediately.