The Painlevé Equations and Orthogonal Polynomials

This article is a survey of the recent studies jointly with Lies Boelen, Christophe Smet, Walter Van Assche and Lun Zhang (KULeuven, Belgium) on semi-classical continuous and discrete orthogonal polynomials and, in particular, on the connection of their recurrence coefficients to the solutions of the Painlevé equations. After recalling some basic facts about the Painlevé equations, we discuss continuous and discrete orthogonal polynomials and explain their connection.