Recent years have seen a great deal of progress in the field of orthogonal
polynomials, a subject closely related to many important branches of analysis.
Orthogonal polynomials are connected with trigonometric, hypergeometric,
Bessel, and elliptic functions, are related to the theory of continued fractions and to important problems of interpolation and mechanical quadrature, and are of occasional occurrence in the theories of differential and integral equations.
In addition, they furnish comparatively general and instructive illustrations of
certain situations in the theory of orthogonal systems. Recently, some of these polynomials have been shown to be of significance in quantum mechanics and in mathematical statistics.