Rant of the week: People with sets of annoying functions named after them

I'd like this week to talk about some guys I really hate. Two of them are French and the other German, and thankfully they're all dead. What do they have in common? They've all invented bastard sets of mathematical expressions that aren't useful at all (although you know they probably are in some weird way). Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I'm talking about Legendre, Laguerre and Bessel.

Adrien-Marie Legendre was a mathematician of the utmost depravity. Born in the cauldrons of Hell in 1752, he made his fortune selling amphetamines to school children. Some sources say he was born with a long red forked tail, which he was later forced to have amputated before he could receive his mathematics PhD. His Legendre polynomials were an astonishing achievement, describing for the first time the dynamics of evil in a homogeneous field of Satan.

Debate currently rages amongst mathematicians over whose polynomials are cooler, Legendre's or Laguerre's. It is a well-known fact that Laguerre polynomials don't mean anything and are completely pointless and arbitrary, yet since 1902 it has been a legal requirement for all optics papers to mention them in order to make them harder to read. Legend has it Laguerre wrote his polynomials whilst in solitary confinement at a high-security insane asylum in Mexico.

While the functions of Laguerre and Legendre are credited with annoying countless physicists throughout the centuries, few can rival Bessel's for sheer craziness. One of the most complicated Bessel functions is so complicated it even introduces a new type of number, neither real or imaginary, and greater than infinity. Only 12 men (including Bessel himself) can ever claim to have written down a Bessel function. Of the few who have gained sufficient mathematical understanding to do so, most have simply not lived long enough to finish physically writing one down.