An extended class of orthogonal polynomials defined by a Sturm-Liouville problem (Q2272054)

The authors introduce two new families of orthogonal polynomials, which they call \(X_1\)-Jacobi and \(X_1\)-Laguerre polynomials. These polynomials are eigenfunctions of a Sturm-Liouville problem based on a second-order differential operator with rational coefficients. In both families the constant polynomial (of degree \(0\)) is missing; the other polynomials are orthogonal with respect to a weight function which is a rational variant of the classical weight function for either the Jacobi or the Laguerre polynomials. The authors show that both sequences are complete in their corresponding \(L^2\) spaces. Moreover, they prove a variant of the theorem by Bochner: if a self-adjoint second-order operator has a complete set of orthogonal polynomials starting with a polynomial of degree one, then it must be either a \(X_1\)-Jacobi or a \(X_1\)-Laguerre Sturm-Liouville problem. Finally, they discuss some elementary properties of the new families of orthogonal polynomials, such as the relation to the classical ones, a recurrence relation, a Rodrigues formula and some nice results concerning the zeros.