A unified construction of all the hypergeometric and basic hypergeometric families of orthogonal polynomial sequences (Q2041780)

The author considers the set of all orthogonal polynomial sequences \(\{ u_{k}(t) \}\), called class \(\mathcal{H}\), defined by means of a given complex parameter \(z\), an operator \(\mathcal{D}\) and three sequences of constants \(\{h_{k}\}\), \(\{x_{k}\}\) and \(\{g_{k}\}\) defined as follows. On one hand, the sequences \(\{h_{k}\}\), \(\{x_{k}\}\) fulfil the recurrence relation \[s_{k+3}=z\left( s_{k+2}-s_{k+1} \right) + s_{k} \,, \quad k \geq 0,\] and the sequence \(g_{k}\) fulfils \(g_{0}=0\) and \[ s_{k+5}=\left(z^2-z-1\right) \left( s_{k+4}-s_{k+1} \right)- (z-1)\left(z^2-z-1\right)\left( s_{k+3}-s_{k+2} \right)+s_{k}\,,\quad k \geq 0.\] On the other hand, the operator \(\mathcal{D}\) on the space of polynomials is defined by \[\mathcal{D}\left( v_{k}\right) = h_{k}v_{k}+g_{k}v_{k-1}\] where \(\{ v_{k} \}\) is the Newton basis associated with the sequence \(\{x_{k}\}\), that is \(v_{0}(t)=1\) and \[v_{k}(t)=(t-x_{0})(t-x_{1})(t-x_{2})\cdots(t-x_{k-1})\, , \quad k \geq 1.\] The polynomial sequence \(\{ u_{k} \}\) is then defined by eigenfunctions of \(\mathcal{D}\), so that \(\mathcal{D}u_{k}=h_{k}u_{k}\,,\) \(k \geq 0.\) It is shown that if the sequence \(h_{k}\) fulfils \(h_{k} \neq h_{j}\), for \(k\neq j\), then \[u_{n}(t)=\sum_{k=0}^{n}c_{n,k}v_{k}(t)\,, \quad n \geq 0\] where \(c_{n,k}= \prod_{j=k}^{n-1} \dfrac{g_{j+1}}{h_{n}-h_{j}}\,, \quad 0 \leq k \leq n-1\), and \(c_{n,n}=1\,, n \geq 0\). \newline The author presents the entries of the matrix representation of the operator of multiplication by \(t\), with respect to the basis \(\{u_{k}(t) : k \geq 0 \}\), in terms of the sequences \(\{h_{k}\}\), \(\{x_{k}\}\) and \(\{g_{k}\}\). When the matrix is tridiagonal, the usual three-term recurrence relation is obtained and an important theorem provides the conditions that characterise that feature. Moreover, three different subsets of \(\mathcal{H}\) are studied, namely \(\mathcal{H}_{q}\), \(\mathcal{H}_{1}\) and \(\mathcal{H}_{-1}\). In particular, the author finds in \(\mathcal{H}_{q}\) all the families of basic hypergeometric orthogonal polynomial sequences in the \(q\)-Askey scheme and in \(\mathcal{H}_{1}\) all the families of hypergeometric orthogonal polynomial sequences in the Askey scheme.