Legendre polynomials
Polinomios de Legendre
- Date
- 1782 · confidence high
- Place
- Paris, France
- Credited to
- Adrien-Marie Legendre
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What was discovered
Studying the gravitational attraction of homogeneous spheroids for the Academy of Sciences, Legendre introduced a family of orthogonal polynomials that appear as coefficients when expanding the Newtonian potential in spherical coordinates.
What it led to
- Spherical harmonic functions and their use in electrostatics and quantum mechanics
- Gaussian quadrature methods based on the roots of these polynomials