Preface

Summary

I first came across the subject of orthogonal polynomials when I was a student at Cairo University in 1964. It was part of a senior-level course on special functions taught by the late Professor Foad M. Ragab. The instructor used his own notes, which were very similar in spirit to the way Rainville treated the subject. I enjoyed Ragab's lectures and, when I started graduate school in 1968 at the Univerity of Alberta, I was fortunate to work with Waleed Al-Salam on special functions and q-series. Jerry Fields taught me asymptotics and was very generous with his time and ideas. In the late 1960s, courses in special functions were a rarity at North American universities and have been replaced by Bourbaki-type mathematics courses. In the early 1970s, Richard Askey emerged as the leader in the area of special functions and orthogonal polynomials, and the reader of this book will see the enormous impact he made on the subject of orthogonal polynomials. At the same time, George Andrews was promoting q-series and their applications to number theory and combinatorics. So when Andrews and Askey joined forces in the mid-1970s, their combined expertise advanced the subject in leaps and bounds. I was very fortunate to have been part of this group and to participate in these developments. My generation of special functions / orthogonal polynomials people owes Andrews and Askey a great deal for their ideas which fueled the subject for a while, for the leadership role they played, and for taking great care of young people.