Because the Legendre polynomials form a complete orthogonal system over the interval with respect to the weighting function , any function may be expanded in terms of them as
(1)
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To obtain the coefficients in the expansion, multiply both sides by and integrate
(2)
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But the Legendre polynomials obey the orthogonality relationship
(3)
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where is the Kronecker delta, so
(4)
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(5)
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and
(6)
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For example, for , the first few terms of the Fourier-Legendre series are
(7)
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