Hello and welcome to the September AMS Notices Spotlight. Since the last spotlight, many of you have started a new school year and if you haven’t started yet you are getting ready to start very soon. With that in mind, take a moment before the busyness of the semester sets in and peruse the September AMS Notices. There are many great articles in this month’s notices, including a sampler from the three sectional meetings that are going to occur this fall and several articles about bikes and math. We mentioned in our last spotlight that every issue of the AMS Notices includes a dedicated graduate student section. In the graduate student section, there is usually an interview of someone notable, and at least one article written with graduate students in mind. This month we are highlighting one of these articles.
The spotlight this month falls on the article entitled “What is a Sobolev Orthogonal Polynomial?” written by Francisco Marcellán and Juan J. Moreno-Balcázar. This article provides a brief introduction to the so-called Sobolev orthogonal polynomials, and then discusses the history, various areas that utilize the Sobolev polynomials, certain variations of these polynomials and concludes with a brief outline of the current research into these polynomials. It is a brief article but very understandable and a good read. In order to get the most out of this article, the reader need only have a basic understanding of Lebesgue measure and integration along with a little bit of inner product theory, most which is typically seen in a core analysis sequence at the graduate level. We encourage you to take a moment out of your busy day to take a look at this article, or if not this one, find an article that excites you to look through sometime this month. Good luck with your semester and tune in next month for the next AMS Notices Spotlight!