From: Michael on
Running MATLAB 7.9.0 (R2009b), I encountered something interesting:

If you define the symbolic variable 'r', and then attempt to define a function, say

f = besselh(0,1,r)

Matlab states that "Arguments must be numeric". No such problem is encountered with besselj(0,r) or bessely(0,r).

From page 358 of Abramowitz and Stegun we see that Hankel functions of the first kind can be defined as:

H_n^1 (z) = J_n (z) + i Y_n (z).

This allows me to sidestep the problem encountered above. Perhaps this is something that MATLAB could do automatically? Just wanted to bring some attention to this curious encounter.