Construction and implementation of asymptotic expansions for Jacobi-type orthogonal polynomials Articles uri icon

publication date

  • August 2016

start page

  • 791

end page

  • 822

issue

  • 4

volume

  • 42

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 1019-7168

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1572-9044

abstract

  • We are interested in the asymptotic behavior of orthogonal polynomials of the generalized Jacobi type as their degree n goes to . These are defined on the interval [-1, 1] with weight function w(x) = (1 - x)(alpha)(1 + x)(beta) h(x), alpha, beta > -1 and h(x) a real, analytic and strictly positive function on [-1, 1]. This information is available in the work of Kuijlaars et al. (Adv. Math. 188, 337-398 2004), where the authors use the Riemann-Hilbert formulation and the Deift-Zhou non-linear steepest descent method. We show that computing higher-order terms can be simplified, leading to their efficient construction. The resulting asymptotic expansions in every region of the complex plane are implemented both symbolically and numerically, and the code is made publicly available. The main advantage of these expansions is that they lead to increasing accuracy for increasing degree of the polynomials, at a computational cost that is actually independent of the degree. In contrast, the typical use of the recurrence relation for orthogonal polynomials in computations leads to a cost that is at least linear in the degree. Furthermore, the expansions may be used to compute Gaussian quadrature rules in operations, rather than based on the recurrence relation.

keywords

  • asymptotic analysis; jacobi polynomials; riemann-hilbert problems; numerical software; gauss-legendre; numerical-solution; quadrature nodes; steepest descent; computation; weights; parameters; algorithm