Press[1]
gives a short stable code for calculating these. He also gives a warning that "most of
the recurrences involving m are unstable, and so dangerous for numerical
work. The stable recurrence is on ![]()
This is useful because
The double factorial is defined by n!! is the product of all odd integers less than or equal to n.
Using with
and setting
, we find
Thus and provide a starting point for .
The actual code is very short.
[1] W. H. Press, et al, Numerical Recipes, Cambridge University Press (1986) section 6.6 Spherical Harmonics, p 182