An efficient high order numerical method is presented to solve the mobile-immobile advection-dispersion model with the Coimbra time variable-order fractional derivative, which is used to simulate solute transport in watershed catchments and rivers. On establishing an efficient recursive algorithm based on the properties of Jacobi polynomials to approximate the Coimbra variable-order fractional derivative operator, we use spectral collocation method with both temporal and spatial discretisation to solve the time variable-order fractional mobile-immobile advection-dispersion model. Numerical examples then illustrate the effectiveness and high order convergence of our approach.

The finite Fourier transform of a family of orthogonal polynomials is the usual transform of these polynomials extended by $0$ outside their natural domain of orthogonality. Explicit expressions are given for the Legendre, Jacobi, Gegenbauer and Chebyshev families.

In the spectral solution of 3-D Poisson equations in cylindrical and spherical coordinates including the axis or the center, it is convenient to employ radial basis functions that depend on the Fourier wavenumber or on the latitudinal mode. This idea has been adopted by Matsushima and Marcus and by Verkley for planar problems and pursued by the present authors for spherical ones. For the Dirichlet boundary value problem in both geometries, original bases have been introduced built upon Jacobi polynomials which lead to a purely diagonal representation of the radial second-order differential operator of all spectral modes. This note details the origin of such a diagonalization which extends to cylindrical and spherical regions the properties of the Legendre basis introduced by Jie Shen for Cartesian domains. Closed form expressions are derived for the diagonal elements of the stiffness matrices as well as for the elements of the tridiagonal mass matrices occurring in evolutionary problems. Furthermore, the bound on the condition number of the spectral matrices associated with the Helmholtz equation are determined, proving in a rigorous way one of the main advantages of the proposed radial bases.

In some recent investigations involving certain differential operators for a general family of Lagrange polynomials, Chan el al. encountered and proved a certain summation identity for the Lagrange polynomials in several variables. In the present paper, we derive some generalizations of this summation identity for the Chan-Chyan-Srivastava polynomials in several variables. We also discuss a number of interesting corollaries and consequences of our main results.

If μk,n(α,β) denotes the relative extrema of the Jacobi polynomial P(α,β)n(x), ordered so that μk+1,n(α,β) lies to the left of μk,n(α,β), then R. A. Askey has conjectured twenty years ago that for for k = 1,…, n — 1 and n = 1,2,=. In this paper, we give an asymptotic expansion for μk,n(α,β) when k is fixed and n → ∞, which corrects an earlier result of R. Cooper (1950). Furthermore, we show that Askey's conjecture is true at least in the asymptotic sense.