The general theory of orthogonal polynomials was developed in the late 19th century from a study of continued fractions by P. L. Chebyshev, even though special cases were introduced earlier by Legendre, Hermite, Jacobi, Laguerre, and Chebyshev himself. It was further developed by A. A. Markov, T. J. Stieltjes, and many other mathematicians. The book by Szego, originally published in 1939, is the first monograph devoted to the theory of orthogonal polynomials and its applications in many areas, including analysis, differential equations, probability and mathematical physics. Even after all the years that have passed since the book first appeared, and with many other books on the subject published since then, this classic monograph by Szego remains an indispensable resource both as a textbook and as a reference book. It can be recommended to anyone who wants to be acquainted with this central topic of mathematical analysis.

An encyclopedic presentation of general orthogonal polynomials, placing emphasis on asymptotic behaviour and zero distribution.

"This concise introduction covers general elementary theory related to orthogonal polynomials and assumes only a first undergraduate course in real analysis. Topics include the representation theorem and distribution functions, continued fractions and chain sequences, the recurrence formula and properties of orthogonal polynomials, special functions, and some specific systems of orthogonal polynomials. 1978 edition"--

Publisher description

The first modern treatment of orthogonal polynomials from the viewpoint of special functions is now available in paperback.

Updated throughout, this revised edition contains 25% new material covering progress made in the field over the past decade.

This book defines sets of orthogonal polynomials and derives a number of properties satisfied by any such set. It continues by describing the classical orthogonal polynomials and the additional properties they have.The first chapter defines the orthogonality condition for two functions. It then gives an iterative process to produce a set of polynomials which are orthogonal to one another and then describes a number of properties satisfied by any set of orthogonal polynomials. The classical orthogonal polynomials arise when the weight function in the orthogonality condition has a particular form. These polynomials have a further set of properties and in particular satisfy a second order differential equation.Each subsequent chapter investigates the properties of a particular polynomial set starting from its differential equation.

This book presents a systematic course on general orthogonal polynomials and Fourier series in orthogonal polynomials. It consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 deals in essence with standard results from the university course on the function theory of a real variable and on functional analysis. Chapter 2 contains the classical results about the orthogonal polynomials (some properties, classical Jacobi polynomials and the criteria of boundedness).The main subject of the book is Fourier series in general orthogonal polynomials. Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to some results in this topic (classical results about convergence and summability of Fourier series in L2μ; summability almost everywhere by the Cesaro means and the Poisson-Abel method for Fourier polynomial series are the subject of Chapters 4 and 5).The last chapter contains some estimates regarding the generalized shift operator and the generalized product formula, associated with general orthogonal polynomials.The starting point of the technique in Chapters 4 and 5 is the representations of bilinear and trilinear forms obtained by the author. The results obtained in these two chapters are new ones.Chapters 2 and 3 (and part of Chapter 1) will be useful to postgraduate students, and one can choose them for treatment.This book is intended for researchers (mathematicians, mechanicians and physicists) whose work involves function theory, functional analysis, harmonic analysis and approximation theory.

This volume expands on a set of lectures held at the Courant Institute on Riemann-Hilbert problems, orthogonal polynomials, and random matrix theory. The goal of the course was to prove universality for a variety of statistical quantities arising in the theory of random matrix models. The central question was the following: Why do very general ensembles of random n times n matrices exhibit universal behavior as n > infinity? The main ingredient in the proof is the steepest descent method for oscillatory Riemann-Hilbert problems. Titles in this series are copublished with the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.