Finite Blaschke products with prescribed critical points, Stieltjes polynomials, and moment problems (Q1999819)

This interesting paper is related to the problem of the determination of a finite Blaschke product from its critical points, a well-known problem with interrelations to several other topics. The existence and uniqueness of the solutions to the problem are known, but the authors present new aspects which have not yet been explored to their full extent. The authors show that the following three problems are equivalent: (i) determining a finite Blaschke product from its critical points, (ii) finding the equilibrium position of moveable point charges interacting with a special configuration of fixed charges, and (iii) solving a moment problem for the canonical representation of power moments on the real axis. As the authors note, the mentioned equivalences are not only of theoretical interest, but also open up new perspectives for the design of algorithms. In particular, the second problem is related to the determination of certain Stieltjes and Van Vleck polynomials for a second-order ODE and characterizes solutions as global minimizers of an energy functional.