This Daily Study Group offers a comprehensive introduction to special functions, their properties and their wide-ranging applications through the powerful lens of Wolfram Language. The Study Group draws on lessons from an upcoming Wolfram U interactive course and begins with the historical development of special functions and foundational methods for working with them, including symbolic evaluation, analytic continuation and high-precision numerical computation. As the lessons progress, we will explore major classes of special functions, including the gamma and zeta families, special integrals, Bessel and Airy functions, orthogonal polynomials and hypergeometric functions, as well as advanced topics. Though essential in many areas of mathematics, physics and engineering, these topics are often underrepresented in traditional university curricula. Lessons in this Study Group are designed to fill that gap with practical computation, visualization and theory.

In Daily Study Groups, the instructor guides each session by sharing short lessons with examples, polling the group to review key concepts, introducing practice problems and answering questions. A certificate of program completion will be awarded to participants who attend online sessions and pass course quizzes. This Study Group meets daily, Monday through Friday.