Open Access

Wolfram Koepf

• In this article we present a method to implement orthogonal polynomials and many other special functions in Computer Algebra systems enabling the user to work with those functions appropriately, and in particular to verify different types of identities for those functions. Some of these identities like differential equations, power series representations, and hypergeometric representations can even dealt with algorithmically, i.\ e.\ they can be computed by the Computer Algebra system, rather than only verified. The types of functions that can be treated by the given technique cover the generalized hypergeometric functions, and therefore most of the special functions that can be found in mathematical dictionaries. The types of identities for which we present verification algorithms cover differential equations, power series representations, identities of the Rodrigues type, hypergeometric representations, and algorithms containing symbolic sums. The current implementations of special functions in existing Computer Algebra systems do not meet these high standards as we shall show in examples. They should be modified, and we show results of our implementations.