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An Efficient Spectral Method For Ordinary Differential Equations With Rational Function Coefficients, Evangelos A. Coutsias, Thomas Hagstrom, David Torres

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

We present some relations that allow the efficient approximate inversion of linear differential operators with rational function coefficients. We employ expansions in terms of a large class of orthogonal polynomial families, including all the classical orthogonal polynomials. These families obey a simple 3-term recurrence relation for differentiation, which implies that on an appropriately restricted domain the differentiation operator has a unique banded inverse. The inverse is an integration operator for the family, and it is simply the tridiagonal coefficient matrix for the recurrence. Since in these families convolution operators (i.e., matrix representations of multiplication by a function) are banded for …