A Survey on Symbolic Summation in Difference Rings

This survey article provides an overview of the fundamental principles used to simplify multi-sums into indefinite nested sums over hypergeometric products in the setting of difference rings. We place special emphasis on the algorithmic translation between hypergeometric sums and the formal difference ring setting. Furthermore, we detail the core summation paradigms of telescoping, creative telescoping, and recurrence solving within difference rings, illustrating these techniques and their underlying algorithms with concrete examples.