Polynomial Approximation in Sobolev Spaces on the Unit Sphere and the Unit Ball

This work is a continuation of the recent study by the authors on approximation theory over the sphere and the ball. The main results define new Sobolev spaces on these domains and study polynomial approximations for functions in these spaces, including simultaneous approximation by polynomials and relation between best approximation to a function and to its derivatives.Comment: 16 page

On the numerical calculation of the roots of special functions satisfying second order ordinary differential equations

We describe a method for calculating the roots of special functions satisfying second order linear ordinary differential equations. It exploits the recent observation that the solutions of a large class of such equations can be represented via nonoscillatory phase functions, even in the high-frequency regime. Our algorithm achieves near machine precision accuracy and the time required to compute one root of a solution is independent of the frequency of oscillations of that solution. Moreover, despite its great generality, our approach is competitive with specialized, state-of-the-art methods for the construction of Gaussian quadrature rules of large orders when it used in such a capacity. The performance of the scheme is illustrated with several numerical experiments and a Fortran implementation of our algorithm is available at the author's website