The international symposium OPSFA (Orthogonal Polynomials, Special Functions, and Applications) took place at Softwarepark Hagenberg between July 22 and 26, 2019. The conference was organized jointly by the institutes RISC (JKU Institute for Symbolic Computing) and RICAM (Radon Institute of the Academy of Sciences). The conference takes place every two years and previous venues included Kent (UK), Gaithersburg (USA), Sousse (Tunisia), Madrid, Munich, Copenhagen, and Rome. The OPSFA is one of the world's top conferences in the field of Special Functions and regularly attracts many renowned scientists. This year, junior scientists in particular were strongly represented, supported by special grants provided by the Linz University Fund and the JKU Doctoral College in Computational Mathematics. Conference organizers in Hagenberg welcomed a total of 200 participants from 42 countries.

"Special functions" have been introduced to the field of natural sciences to describe physical phenomena for which conventional functions (parabola, hyperbola, exponential functions, logarithms, etc.) are insufficient: for example membrane oscillation or a rainbow’s light distribution. The interest in OPSFA is strong as even today these special functions still play an important role in mathematics, whether it be in solving differential equations, numerical simulations or in number theory.