ABSTRACT
This remark has been attributed to a number of distinguished mathematicians and numerical analysts. It may be due to Philip Davis, was certainly spoken by George Forsythe, and it is an appealing and apt remark. There is scarcely any area of numerical analysis where Chebyshev polynomials do not drop in like surprise visitors, and indeed there are now a number of subjects in which these polynomials take a significant position in modern developments — including orthogonal polynomials, polynomial approximation, numerical integration, and spectral methods for partial differential equations.
