Many thanks to those who put me straight. Especially to Eric Weisstein, who referred me to Continued Fraction Constant in his Encyclopedia, where I find references to Lehmer and Guy (and Finch and Schroeppel)! R. On Tue, 4 Oct 2005, jdb@math.arizona.edu wrote:
Dear Bill, There is a paper of D.H. Lehmer that may interest you:
Continued fractions containing arithmetic progressions, Scripta Math., 29, (1973), 17-24.
The results involve ratios of Bessel functions. Best, John PS By the way, I'm afraid I didn't make clear what I was asking before about computing the discriminant of a polynomial. What I was asking was how computer systems compute this, such as Macsyma. I was particularly interested in some systems that allow symbolic manipulation. I presume that Sylvester's determinant is involved in any case. I was interested in particular in a slick way to find the discriminant of the nth polynomial of a sequence of orthogonal polynomials given by a Favard recursion.
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