Submitted:
30 December 2025
Posted:
31 December 2025
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Abstract
Calculating finite sums and products of trigonometric functions is an important and fascinating problem, a straightforward method is using infinite series or infinite product. In this paper, we calculate four finite sums and a finite product of trigonometric functions using this method, which contributes to a deeper understanding of this problem.
Keywords:
trigonometric identity
; finite sum
; finite product
; infinite series
; infinite product
1. Introduction
Finite sums and products of trigonometric functions are emerged in various of disciplines such as combinatorics, number theory (see [1,2,3]), and Fourier analysis. Due to its fascinating and technical nature, it has been extensively studied. This problem has been particularly explored since the mid-19th century, thanks to the development of complex analysis and the study of combinatorial identities (see [4,5]).
Early on, people derived the closed forms by elementary transformations for two sums
where n is a positive integer and x is a real number, which are very common in Fourier analysis (see [6]). Later, people noticed the relationship between the values of trigonometric functions and the roots of algebraic polynomials. Applying Vieta’s theorem and the properties of polynomials, they derived a large number of trigonometric identities which contain , where n is a positive integer and (see [7,8,9]). In 1861, Stern proved that for odd number n with , the equation
holds (see [10]). In 1997, Byrne and Simth proved that for positive integers m and n, the results of following two sums
are positive integers (see [11]). In 1999, Chu and Marini applied generating functions, partial fraction decomposition, and some combinatorial identities to derive the closed forms for 24 finite sums of trigonometric functions (see [12]). In 2007, Wang expanded Chu and Marini’s results in 1999 by adding parameters, and used partial fraction decomposition, hypergeometric series, and cyclotomic polynomials to obtain the closed forms for some new finite sums of trigonometric functions (see [13]). These two papers represent the most comprehensive and systematic research on this problem to date, and have contributed to substantial progress in this area. In recent years, this issue has continued to be studied, and a large number of related results are still emerging (such as [2,3,9]).
In this paper, we will firstly use the fact that
to derive the trigonometric identity
Then, we will use this result to provide new proofs for the following two infinite series and an infinite product (also see [14]). Specifically,
and
2. Main Results
In later chapters, we denote , . And we denote as the lth derivative of , where l is a nonnegative integer. The Riemann zeta function is defined as
where l is a positive integer with .
Now we present the main results through the following theorems.
Theorem 1.
Let n be a positive integer and α be a real number such that , then for nonnegative integer l, we have
Theorem 2.
Let n be a positive integer with , then for nonnegative integer l, we have
Theorem 3.
Let n be a positive odd number and α be a real number such that , then for nonnegative integer l, we have
Theorem 4.
Let n be an odd number with , then for nonnegative integer l, we have
Theorem 5
3. Some Lemmas
Firstly, we introduce some lemmas as follows.
Lemma 1.
Let n be a positive integer and α be a real number such that , then we have
Proof.
Let a be a complex number with , then for , we have
According to Taylor’s formula, we know that
holds for . Thus,
It is easy to verify that
Letting in (3), we have
By Euler’s formula, we could get that
Lemma 1 is proved. □
Lemma 2.
While , the function is monotonically decreasing and the range of is . Furthermore, let n be a positive integer and x be a real number such that , then we have
Proof.
The concavity of function while immediately yields that is monotonically decreasing. Then we have
Therefore, the range of is . Now, we prove the last inequality. Because is an even function and while , we only need to show that
Using the monotonicity of and
we know that
Lemma 2 is proved. □
Lemma 3.
Let x be a real number with , then we have
and
Proof.
Let n be a sufficiently large positive integer and be a real number such that , then according to Lemma 1, we have
Thus, if we let and , we have
According to Lemma 2, we know that
Letting in above inequality, we obtain
Now we fix x in . From the convergence of the series
we could get that for arbitrary positive number , there exists a positive integer K, such that
According to Lemma 2, for positive integers n and p, if , we have
Letting in (7), we could get
Combining (5) and (8), we know that
holds for . In fact, equation (9) has a period of , so (9) holds for x with . Assuming and integrating both sides of (9) yields
Namely
Lemma 4.
Let x be a real number, then we have
4. Proofs of Main Results
Now, we use the above lemmas to prove our main results. The core idea of proving these theorems is using infinite series or infinite product, and then appropriately combining them to obtain the target results.
4.1. Proof of Theorem 1
Proof.
Recalling Lemma 3, we have
Calculating the lth order derivative of with respect to x, we get
In (13), we take in turn, and we get that
Theorem 1 is proved. □
Remark 1.
The proof of Theorem 1 shows that Lemma 1 and Lemma 3 are equivalent, and we also could calculate the lth order derivative of
(where ) with respect to α to get Theorem 1.
4.2. Proof of Theorem 2
4.3. Proof of Theorem 3
4.4. Proof of Theorem 4
Proof.
We used the fact that for all positive integers m, both and are even. We notice that
and
Theorem 4 is proved. □
4.5. Proof of Theorem 5
Proof.
Recalling Lemma 4, we have
In (24), we take in turn, and we get that
We used the fact that
Thus, we only need to calculate
By Stirling’s formula, namely
where is the base of the natural logarithm, we could obtain that
Theorem 5 is proved. □
Remark 2.
According to Theorem 5, if and , then we have
Letting in above equation, we could get that
which is a classical result.
Furthermore, according to the fact that
where x and y are two real numbers, we could obtain a more general result. Let α and θ be two real numbers and n be a positive integer, then from Theorem 5, we have
namely
Therefore, we proved that is a polynomial of degree n about with roots , where . And if , then the above result is Theorem 5.
5. Some Examples
As corollaries of our results, we introduce some examples. We will use the following facts.
Example 1
Proof.
Taking in turn, we could get the following equations from Theorem 1.
Combining the above three equations yields the desired results. □
Example 2
Proof.
Taking in turn, we could get the following equations from Theorem 2.
By combining the above three equations, we immediately obtain the final results. □
Example 3
Proof.
Taking in turn, we could get the following equations from Theorem 3.
Combining the above three equations immediately yields the results. □
Example 4
Proof.
Taking in turn, we could get the following equations from Theorem 4.
Therefore, the final results follow directly from the combination of the above three equations. □
6. Conclusions and Discussions
In this paper, we used infinite series and infinite product to derive some trigonometric identities. Their forms are concise and elegant. However, we did not discuss whether infinite series can be used to derive identities for tangent or cotangent function. Some known results for tangent or cotangent function are also very elegant, such as [10,12,13]. Therefore, we believe this is a question worth exploring, and more interesting methods and results are sure to emerge.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization, Y.Z.; methodology, Y.Z.; validation, Y.Z.; formal analysis, Y.Z.; investigation, Y.Z.; resources, Y.Z.; writing—original draft preparation, Y.Z.; writing—review and editing, Y.Z. and F.G.; supervision, F.G.; project administration, F.G.; funding acquisition, F.G. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Data Availability Statement
No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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