On polynomial solutions of differential equations

A general method of obtaining linear differential equations having polynomial solutions is proposed. The method is based on an equivalence of the spectral problem for an element of the universal enveloping algebra of some Lie algebra in the "projectivized" representation possessing an invariant subspace and the spectral problem for a certain linear differential operator with variable coefficients. It is shown in general that polynomial solutions of partial differential equations occur; in the case of Lie superalgebras there are polynomial solutions of some matrix differential equations, quantum algebras give rise to polynomial solutions of finite--difference equations. Particularly, known classical orthogonal polynomials will appear when considering $SL(2,{\bf R})$ acting on ${\bf RP_1}$. As examples, some polynomials connected to projectivized representations of $sl_2 ({\bf R})$, $sl_2 ({\bf R})_q$, $osp(2,2)$ and $so_3$ are briefly discussed.Comment: 12p

Symbolic computation of hyperbolic tangent solutions for nonlinear differential-difference equations

A new algorithm is presented to find exact traveling wave solutions of differential-difference equations in terms of tanh functions. For systems with parameters, the algorithm determines the conditions on the parameters so that the equations might admit polynomial solutions in tanh. Examples illustrate the key steps of the algorithm. Parallels are drawn through discussion and example to the tanh-method for partial differential equations. The new algorithm is implemented in Mathematica. The package DDESpecialSolutions.m can be used to automatically compute traveling wave solutions of nonlinear polynomial differential-difference equations. Use of the package, implementation issues, scope, and limitations of the software are addressed.Comment: 19 pages submitted to Computer Physics Communications. The software can be downloaded at http://www.mines.edu/fs_home/wherema

Differential Galois Theory of Linear Difference Equations

We present a Galois theory of difference equations designed to measure the differential dependencies among solutions of linear difference equations. With this we are able to reprove Hoelder's Theorem that the Gamma function satisfies no polynomial differential equation and are able to give general results that imply, for example, that no differential relationship holds among solutions of certain classes of q-hypergeometric functions.Comment: 50 page

On a moment generalization of some classical second-order differential equations generating classical orthogonal polynomials

The aim of the work is to construct new polynomial systems, which are solutions to certain functional equations which generalize the second-order differential equations satisfied by the so called classical orthogonal polynomial families of Jacobi, Laguerre, Hermite and Bessel. These functional equations can be chosen to be of different type: fractional differential equations, q-difference equations, etc, which converge to their respective differential equations of the aforesaid classical orthogonal polynomials. In addition to this, there exists a confluence of both the families of polynomials constructed and the functional equations who approach to the classical families of polynomials and second-order differential equations, respectivel