The Birth and Early Developments of Orthogonal Polynomials

From Celestial Spheroids to Mathematical Gems: A History of Orthogonal Polynomials

The shape of the Earth captivated eighteenth-century scientists. The discovery that our planet was flattened at the poles sparked inquiries into the gravitational attraction of celestial spheroids. This pursuit drew upon Newton’s law of universal gravitation, employing the distance between bodies based on the law of cosines. Expanding the inverse of this distance into a power series organically led to…