Our primary result concerns the positivity of specific kernels constructed using the q-ultraspherical polynomials. In other words, it concerns a two-parameter family of bivariate, compactly supported distributions. Moreover, this family has a property that all its conditional moments are polynomials in the conditioning random variable. The significance of this result is evident for individuals working on distribution theory, orthogonal polynomials, q-series theory, and the so-called quantum polynomials. Therefore, it may have a limited number of interested researchers. That is why, we put our results into a broader context. We recall the theory of Hilbert–Schmidt operators and the idea of Lancaster expansions (LEs) of the bivariate distributions absolutely continuous with respect to the product of their marginal distributions. Applications of LE can be found in Mathematical Statistics or the creation of Markov processes with polynomial conditional moments (the most well-known of these processes is the famous Wiener process).

We characterize those non-negative, measurable functions ψ on [0, 1] and positive, continuous functions ω1 and ω2 on ℝ+ for which the generalized Hardy–Cesàro operator

$$\begin{equation*}(U_{\psi}f)(x)=\int_0^1 f(tx)\psi(t)\,dt\end{equation*}$$

The classical spaces ℓp+, 1 ≤ p < ∞, and Lp−, 1<p ≤ ∞, are countably normed, reflexive Fréchet spaces in which the Cesàro operator C acts continuously. A detailed investigation is made of various operator theoretic properties of C (e.g., spectrum, point spectrum, mean ergodicity) as well as certain aspects concerning the dynamics of C (e.g., hypercyclic, supercyclic, chaos). This complements the results of [3, 4], where C was studied in the spaces ℂℕ, Lploc(ℝ+) for 1 < p < ∞ and C(ℝ+), which belong to a very different collection of Fréchet spaces, called quojections; these are automatically Banach spaces whenever they admit a continuous norm.

We prove some inequalities for the spectral radius of positive operators on Banach function spaces. In particular, we prove the following extension of Levinger's theorem. Let $K$ be a positive compact kernel operator on $L^2(X, \mu)$ with the spectral radius $r(K)$. Then the function $\phi$ defined by $\phi(t) = r(t K + (1-t) K^*)$ is non-decreasing on $[0, \frac{1}{2}]$. We also prove that $\| A + B^* \| \ge 2 \cdot \sqrt{r(A B)}$ for any positive operators $A$ and $B$ on $L^2(X, \mu)$.