Re: [math-fun] Ratio of two Bessel function values

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.