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The Legendre ordinary differential equation is frequently encountered in physics and other technical fields. In particular, it occurs when solving Laplace's equation (and related partial differential equations) in spherical coordinates. Associated Legendre polynomials play a vital role in the definition of spherical harmonics.
The general Legendre equation reads ″ ′ + [(+)] =, where the numbers λ and μ may be complex, and are called the degree and order of the relevant function, respectively. . The polynomial solutions when λ is an integer (denoted n), and μ = 0 are the Legendre polynomials P n; and when λ is an integer (denoted n), and μ = m is also an integer with | m | < n are the associated Legendre ...
The differential equation admits another, non-polynomial solution, the Legendre functions of the second kind. A two-parameter generalization of (Eq. 1) is called Legendre's general differential equation, solved by the Associated Legendre polynomials.
Classical orthogonal polynomials appeared in the early 19th century in the works of Adrien-Marie Legendre, who introduced the Legendre polynomials. In the late 19th century, the study of continued fractions to solve the moment problem by P. L. Chebyshev and then A.A. Markov and T.J. Stieltjes led to the general notion of orthogonal polynomials.
In the theory of special functions, Whipple's transformation for Legendre functions, named after Francis John Welsh Whipple, arise from a general expression, concerning associated Legendre functions. These formulae have been presented previously in terms of a viewpoint aimed at spherical harmonics , now that we view the equations in terms of ...
Similar formulae hold for many other sequences of orthogonal functions arising from Sturm–Liouville equations, and these are also called the Rodrigues formula (or Rodrigues' type formula) for that case, especially when the resulting sequence is polynomial.
Associated Legendre polynomials are the colatitudinal part of the spherical harmonics which are common to all separations of Laplace's equation in spherical polar coordinates. [2] The radial part of the solution varies from one potential to another, but the harmonics are always the same and are a consequence of spherical symmetry.
In mathematics, Legendre's equation is a Diophantine equation of the form: + + = The equation is named for Adrien-Marie Legendre who proved it in 1785 that it is solvable in integers x, y, z, not all zero, if and only if −bc, −ca and −ab are quadratic residues modulo a, b and c, respectively, where a, b, c are nonzero, square-free, pairwise relatively prime integers and also not all ...