Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
In this paper we give a simple, necessary, and sufficient condition for a sequence of orthogonal functions to be closed in L2. In theory the question of closure is reduced to the evaluation of certain integrals and the summation of an infinite series whose terms depend only upon the index n. Our principal result is
Let p(t) be a function whose zeros and discontinuities have Jordan content zero, such that for each x ∊ (a, b), p(t) ∊ L2 on min (c, x) < t < max (c, x), where a ≤ c ≤ b. (a, b, and c may be infinite.)