Using the "Freshman's Dream" to Prove Combinatorial Congruences (1606.03351v2)

Abstract: In a recent beautiful but technical article, William Y.C. Chen, Qing-Hu Hou, and Doron Zeilberger developed an algorithm for finding and proving congruence identities (modulo primes) of indefinite sums of many combinatorial sequences, namely those (like the Catalan and Motzkin sequences) that are expressible in terms of constant terms of powers of Laurent polynomials. We first give a leisurely exposition of their elementary but brilliant approach, and then extend it in two directions. The Laurent polynomials may be of several variables, and instead of single sums we have multiple sums. In fact we even combine these two generalizations! We conclude with some super-challenges. In this version we report that Roberto Tauraso pointed out that all our conjectured super-congruences, at the end of our article are already known, except one, for which he supplied a beautiful proof that can be found here: arXiv:1606.05543.