Legendre Differential Equation(#2): A friendly introduction

Now there is something about the Legendre differential equation that drove me crazy. What is up with the l(l+1) !!!

$(1-x^2)y^{''} -2xy^{'} + l(l+1)y = 0$

To understand why let’s take this form of the LDE and arrive at the above:

$(1-x^2)y^{''} -2xy^{'} + \lambda y = 0$

$y = \sum\limits_{n=0}^{\infty} a_n x^n$

If we do a power series expansion and following the same steps as the previous post, we end up with the following recursion relation.

$(n+2)(n+1)a_{n+2} = (\lambda -n(n+1))a_n$

$a_{n+2} = a_n \frac{\lambda - n(n+1)}{(n+1)(n+2)}$

Here’s the deal: We want a convergent solution for our differential solution. This means that as $n \rightarrow l , a_{n+2} \rightarrow 0$ .

Hence we obtain that

$\lambda = l(l+1)$

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