Rodrigues' Formula

Rodrigues' Formula

In mathematics, Rodrigues's formula (formerly called the Ivory–Jacobi formula) is a formula for Legendre polynomials independently introduced by Olinde Rodrigues (1816), Sir James Ivory (1824) and Carl Gustav Jacobi (1827). The name "Rodrigues formula" was introduced by Heine in 1878, after Hermite pointed out in 1865 that Rodrigues was the first to discover it, and is also used for generalizations to other orthogonal polynomials. Askey (2005) describes the history of the Rodrigues formula in detail.