Josef Meixner: his life and his orthogonal polynomials (Q1629142)

This well written paper gives an intersting insight in the originating process of the Meixner polynomials. It contains a wealth of historical material that enables the reader to follow the developments through the years, accompanied by the ``Meixner scheme''. This can be seen as a subscheme of the Askey scheme ([\textit{R. Askey} and \textit{J. Wilson}, Mem. Am. Math. Soc. 319, 55 p. (1985; Zbl 0572.33012)] and [\textit{R. Koekoek} et al., Hypergeometric orthogonal polynomials and their \(q\)-analogues. With a foreword by Tom H. Koornwinder. Berlin: Springer (2010; Zbl 1200.33012)]). Throughout the paper the authors use the contemporary notations for the different polynomials. In Section \S1 (Introduction) the authors introduce the starting paper by \textit{J. Meixner} ([J. Lond. Math. Soc. 9, 6--13 (1934; JFM 60.0293.01)]; [2] in the list of references) and give a beautiful description of the layout of the paper, which is reproduced here: ``The contents of the paper is as follows. In Section 2 we describe Meixner's life. Section 3 contains quotations about his motivations to work on orthogonal polynomials and special functions. Next, in Section 4, we give a detailed sketch of his paper [2] introducing Meixner polynomials. However, there was a predecessor on Meixner polynomials: \textit{L. Truksa} [Aktuárské Vědy 2; 65--84, 113--144, 177--203 (1931; JFM 57.0413.01)]. This is discussed in Section 5, where we also pay attention to \textit{F. Pollaczek}'s 1950 paper [C. R. Acad. Sci., Paris 230, 1563--1565 (1950; Zbl 0039.07704)], which rediscovered the Meixner-Pollaczek polynomials. Finally, in Section 6, we review the reception of Meixner's 1934 paper [2] over a period of more than 80 years. A concluding remark mentions the irony of history in fixing names for classes of polynomials and for theorems. We start the references with a selection of Meixner's publications: [1--11] give papers on orthogonal polynomials and special functions, [12--25] papers on spheroidal wave functions and Mathieu functions, and [26--32] books and Handbuch articles.''