In
mathematics, Racah polynomials are
orthogonal polynomials
In mathematics, an orthogonal polynomial sequence is a family of polynomials such that any two different polynomials in the sequence are orthogonal to each other under some inner product.
The most widely used orthogonal polynomials are the cl ...
named after
Giulio Racah
Giulio (Yoel) Racah ( he, ג'וליו (יואל) רקח; February 9, 1909 – August 28, 1965) was an Italian–Israeli physicist and mathematician. He was Acting President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1961 to 1962.
The crater ...
, as their orthogonality relations are equivalent to his orthogonality relations for
Racah coefficients.
The Racah polynomials were first defined by and are given by
:
Orthogonality
:
:when
,
:where
is the Racah polynomial,
:
:
is the
Kronecker delta function and the weight functions are
:
:and
:
:
is the
Pochhammer symbol.
Rodrigues-type formula
:
:where
is the
backward difference operator,
:
Generating functions
There are three generating functions for
:when
or
:
:
:when
or
:
:
:when
or
:
:
Connection formula for Wilson polynomials
When
:
:where
are Wilson polynomials.
q-analog
introduced the ''q''-Racah polynomials defined in terms of
basic hypergeometric function
In mathematics, basic hypergeometric series, or ''q''-hypergeometric series, are ''q''-analogue generalizations of generalized hypergeometric series, and are in turn generalized by elliptic hypergeometric series.
A series ''x'n'' is called ...
s by
:
They are sometimes given with changes of variables as
:
References
*
*
Orthogonal polynomials
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