Computing the zeros of a Fourier series or a Chebyshev series or general orthogonal polynomial series with parity symmetries (Q2460590)

The paper is concerned with the same topic as in the author's published papers in the last years. As he showed in his previous papers, a good strategy for finding the approximate real roots of a transcendental function is to expand the function as a Chebyshev series and then find the zeros of the truncated Chebyshev series. A better strategy is to form, with Chebyshev coefficients, a Chebyshev companion matrix and then compute the eigenvalues of this matrix, which are also the roots of the polynomial. In the present paper a similar treatment for trigonometric polynomials and for general orthogonal polynomials is developed. Based on this development, recursion relations for dividing a Fourier series or orthogonal polynomial series are derived. For trigonometric polynomials the author gives transformations that reduce dramatically the cost, even if the roots are found by an algorithm other than the companion matrix procedure. Many special functions (associated Legendre functions, prolate spheroidal wave functions, Hough functions, Mathieu functions) are approximated to arbitrary precision by a truncated Fourier series with double parity symmetries. As numerical examples, Mathieu functions are approximated by Fourier series and the roots of such functions are computed.