Evaluation of the light changes for distorted eclipsing binaries

This paper discusses a method for improving on the numerical evaluation of the light changes exhibited by a distorted eclipsing binary system.In the theory formulated by Kopal (1959), certain boundary integrals due to the distortion of both components have been calculated in terms of the Appell hypergeometric series of the first kind. The values of the four parameters appearing in these series differ according as to whether one is dealing with a partial or an annular eclipse.To accelerate the numerical evaluation of the light changes one should avoid recomputing such infinite series for contiguous values of the parameters. This can be achieved by making use of certain recursion formulae which hold for the foregoing series.We have provided here a procedure that yields forty-eight recursion formulae for the Appell hypergeometric series and have specifically calculated four new independent recursion formulae relevant to the astrophysical problem.