In a recent study of how the output voltage of a Hall plate is affected by the shape of the plate and the size of its contacts, U. Ausserlechner has come up with a remarkable double integral that can be viewed as a generalisation of the classical elliptic ‘arithmetic–geometric mean (AGM)’ integral. Here we discuss transformation properties of the integral, which were experimentally observed by Ausserlechner, as well as its analytical and arithmetic features including connections with modular forms.

We provide a comprehensive study of the function $h=h(q)$ defined by

$$\begin{eqnarray}h=q\mathop{\prod }_{j=1}^{\infty }\frac{(1-q^{12j-1})(1-q^{12j-11})}{(1-q^{12j-5})(1-q^{12j-7})}\end{eqnarray}$$

$k=k(q)$

$$\begin{eqnarray}k=q\mathop{\prod }_{j=1}^{\infty }\frac{(1-q^{10j-1})(1-q^{10j-2})(1-q^{10j-8})(1-q^{10j-9})}{(1-q^{10j-3})(1-q^{10j-4})(1-q^{10j-6})(1-q^{10j-7})}.\end{eqnarray}$$

The exact analytical expression of the period of a conservative nonlinear oscillator with a non-polynomial potential, is obtained. Such an oscillatory system corresponds to the transverse vibration of a particle attached to the center of a stretched elastic wire. The result is given in terms of elliptic functions and validates the approximate formulae derived from various approximation procedures as the harmonic balance method and the rational harmonic balance method usually implemented for solving such a nonlinear problem.

We prove that the Hessian matrix of the real period function ψ(λ) associated with the real versal deformation fλ(x)=±x4+λ2x2+λ1x+λ0 of a singularity of type A3, is nondegenerate, provided that λ∈${\Bbb R}$3 does not belong to the discriminant set of the singularity. We explain the relation between this result and the perturbations of the spherical pendulum.