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Recollections of the Printed Newsletter for the SIAM Activity Group on Orthogonal Polynomials and Special Functions

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OP-SF NET, the digital newsletter for the SIAM Activity Group on Orthogonal Polynomials and Special Functions (SIAG/OPSF), published its inaugural issue in December 1993. Since its origin, OP-SF NET has maintained a consistent frequency of six issues per year; the complete archive is available online. The digital newsletter began as a beautifully crafted ASCII text document, with Tom Koornwinder as the original editor, and later transitioned from ASCII to a PDF format in 2007. Over the years, subsequent editors have included Martin Muldoon, Diego Dominici, Howard Cohl, Kerstin Jordaan, and Sarah Post. Post and Cohl currently co-edit the newsletter, Post having served as editor for nine years and Cohl for 10 years.

Before the genesis of OP-SF NET and during its early existence, a printed newsletter also serviced the SIAG/OPSF community. This publication originated in the fall of 1990 and endured until October 2002, yielding a total of 34 editions that appeared across 13 volumes:

The editors of the SIAG/OPSF printed newsletter included George Gasper, Charles Dunkl, Eugene Tomer, Wolfram Koepf, Renato Álvarez-Nodarse, and Rafael J. Yáñez: 

  • George Gasper and Charles Dunkl (1990-1991): Volumes 1-1 and 2-1
  • Eugene Tomer (1992-1995): Volumes 3-1 through 5-2
  • Wolfram Koepf (1995-1998): Volumes 6-1 through 9-1
  • Renato Álvarez Nodarse (1997-2001): Volumes 8-3 through 12-3
  • Rafael J. Yáñez (1997-2002): Volumes 8-3 through 13-1.

Wolfram Koepf scanned all of the print issues and has been kindly maintaining an online archive. These materials contain a lot of useful historical information, including many contributions from Richard Askey — a hero to the OPSF community. The SIAG/OPSF printed newsletter is certainly worth a read.

In an email from March 13, 2025, Charles Dunkl reflected on the origin of SIAG/OPSF, his time as chair, and the birth of the newsletter:

Before the newsletter came the start of the SIAM OPSF activity group. It took 30 signatures of SIAM members to get a group organized. I circulated the petition at the NATO Advanced Study Institute’s “Orthogonal Polynomials and Their Applications” held at Ohio State University (Columbus, OH) in May 1989. I chatted with Seymour Parter, who was SIAM president at the time, about the process (I knew him from my time as a grad student at the U. Wisconsin).

<strong>Figure 1.</strong> Eugene Tomer’s design of the SIAG/OPSF logo.
Figure 1. Eugene Tomer’s design of the SIAG/OPSF logo.

I got the signatures and got going on the group. We needed officers besides me — I got George Gasper, Jet Wimp, and Mourad Ismail on board. I approached Dick Askey — he politely suggested I get “younger people” for the job. Out of the blue, I heard from Eugene Tomer who volunteered to produce the newsletter. We hoped for 4-6 pages; it would be typed and then photocopied and printed by SIAM (all done by U.S. mail). Eugene designed a logo (based on the graph of some low-degree Chebyshev polynomials) [see Figure 1], and George Gasper had the idea of a “Problems” section — as a side note, at the 1995 workshop on “Special Functions, q-series and Related Topics” at the Fields Institute in Toronto, George gave a series of lectures, which included homework problems for the younger people (grad students, for example), so setting problems for others is very much George’s m.o. [modus operandi].

I communicated with Eugene exclusively by email — except for one time I met him in person at the SIAM Annual Meeting in Los Angeles — Century City (I recall?). For all the time that he was editor, he did a great and careful job with the newsletter. We invented the position of “appointed editor,” rather than an elected officer — with the approval of SIAM. Eventually, the position passed on to someone else. … Later, I was sorry to hear about [Eugene’s] passing when the American Astronomical Society asked me to write an obituary for him [1]. … My emphases were that he freely gave of his time and energy to support the activity group, and that he strongly wanted us to contribute to worthwhile applications of special functions in the real world. It is true for many of us academics (like me) that we are insulated from the non-university work in mathematics, and it was a privilege for me to interact with someone like Eugene Tomer.

In an email from February 12, 2025, George Gasper commented on his own experiences with SIAG/OPSF and the original newsletter:

While I was secretary (1990-1992) of the SIAM Activity Group on Orthogonal Polynomials and Special Functions, I assisted Charles Dunkl (who was chair of SIAG/OPSF) in editing the SIAG/OPSF printed newsletters for the fall of 1990 (Vol. 1-1, two pages) and 1991 (Vol. 2-1, three pages). The newsletters covered reports of recent and upcoming meetings, current books of interest, editorial notes, etc.

With the growth of the activity group and length of the newsletter, I was glad that Eugene Tomer volunteered to edit the newsletter, and he started editing in July of 1992. The fall of 1992 (Vol. 3-1) newsletter turned out to be eight pages (in double columns), including a three-page Membership Directory of 115 members. Also, since Eugene and I were both amateur radio operators (with call signs WI6X and KK9X, respectively), we enjoyed adding comments about it at the ends of our newsletter-related emails.

When Eugene started editing the newsletter, he added a “Problems” section and requested the submission of new problems for it. My submitted problem concerning the convexity of a certain multiple of a hypergeometric series turned out be Problem 2 in the fall 1992 (Vol. 3-1) newsletter. Since Problem 2 hadn’t been solved by 1996, Dick Askey and I submitted a solution to it, which appeared on pages 18-19 of the Oct. 1997 (Vol. 8-1) issue. Problem 19—Uniform Bounds for Shifted Jacobi Multiplier Sequences (by George Gasper and Walter Trebels), which is in the June 1998 (Vol. 8-3, pp. 11-12) newsletter—is still unsolved.

Eugene Tomer passed away on July 2, 2007, at his home in San Francisco, Calif. As aforementioned, Charles Dunkl wrote an obituary for him in the Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society [1]. There, he reflected on Tomer’s editorship of the printed SIAG/OPSF newsletter:

Thanks to [Eugene’s] skills and efforts, the newsletter became a carefully edited, professional publication … He gave much time and effort to this service in an era when copy had to be physically assembled and mailed to SIAM headquarters. Eventually, he felt he had done what he could for the activity group. He told me that he hoped the group would get seriously involved with applications such as in astronomy, physics, and sciences that use special function solutions of differential equations.

During [Eugene’s] editorship, we communicated mostly by email, our homes being far apart. He was a good friend to the group and to me, as much as one can be over a separation of thousands of miles. 

In an email on January 1, 2025, Wolfram Koepf recalled Eugene Tomer’s transition out of the newsletter role as well as his own stint as editor:

Eugene Tomer was the first editor of the newsletter, and he resigned in 1995. The officers of the SIAM Activity Group on OPSF—at that time, Charles Dunkl, George Gasper, Martin Muldoon, and Tom Koornwinder—asked urgently who would be willing to continue, and I was interested and responded positively. As a result, they appointed me and I started with [Vol.] 6-1. You can read everything about this transition in issue 6-1. 

I didn’t know Eugene Tomer personally, but I had email contact with him and he sent me his files. I found the editing process…very interesting! However, I had written already several books before, so the editing process was not completely new to me. For me, it was clear from the beginning that I would like to do this job for three years or so, and therefore I stopped by asking for somebody to continue. I don’t really remember anything about my transition. … Renato Álvarez-Nodarse and Rafael J. Yáñez agreed; we did [Vol.] 8-3 together, afterwards they took over. I absolutely enjoyed my time being an editor for the newsletter!

Finally, Renato Álvarez-Nodarse reminisced about his own contributions to the newsletter in an email on January 1, 2025:

Wolfram Koepf was the editor before I was, he contacted me and suggested that I become editor. In fact, I (and Rafael J. Yáñez, a colleague from Granada) edited one or two newsletters with Koepf before we started to edit alone! I enjoyed being an editor for the newsletter, but it was a lot of work! I recall that SIAM decided that printing and shipping was very expensive and therefore the printed version should be canceled out.

We hope that the SIAG/OPSF community—and SIAM members as a whole—enjoy these remembrances about the SIAG/OPSF newsletter and take the opportunity to peruse the entire archived collection.

References
[1] Dunkl, C.F. (2009). Eugene Richard Tomer (1932-2007). Bull. Am. Astron. Soc., 41(1).

About the Author

Howard S. Cohl

Mathematician, National Institute of Standards and Technology

Howard S. Cohl is a mathematician at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland; technical editor of the NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions; and chair of the SIAM Activity Group on Orthogonal Polynomials and Special Functions. His research focuses on special functions, including hypergeometric series, orthogonal polynomials in the Askey and \(q\)-Askey schemes, their \(q^{−1}\)-symmetric polynomial counterparts, and function generalizations of these families.