On a conjecture of Widom

Abstract

In 1969 Harold Widom published his seminal paper, which gave a complete description of orthogonal and Chebyshev polynomials on a system of smooth Jordan curves. When there were Jordan arcs present the theory of orthogonal polynomials turned out to be just the same, but for Chebyshev polynomials Widom's approach proved only an upper estimate, which he conjectured to be the correct asymptotic behavior. In this note we make some clarifications which will show that the situation is more complicated.