Many properties can be derived from the properties of the Chebyshev polynomials of the first kind. Other properties are unique to the functions themselves.

${\displaystyle R_{n+1}(x)=2\left({\frac {x-1}{x+1}}\right)R_{n}(x)-R_{n-1}(x)\quad {\text{for}}\,n\geq 1}$ 

${\displaystyle (x+1)^{2}R_{n}(x)={\frac {1}{n+1}}{\frac {\mathrm {d} }{\mathrm {d} x}}R_{n+1}(x)-{\frac {1}{n-1}}{\frac {\mathrm {d} }{\mathrm {d} x}}R_{n-1}(x)\quad {\text{for }}n\geq 2}$ 

${\displaystyle (x+1)^{2}x{\frac {\mathrm {d} ^{2}}{\mathrm {d} x^{2}}}R_{n}(x)+{\frac {(3x+1)(x+1)}{2}}{\frac {\mathrm {d} }{\mathrm {d} x}}R_{n}(x)+n^{2}R_{n}(x)=0}$ 

Defining:

${\displaystyle \omega (x)\ {\stackrel {\mathrm {def} }{=}}\ {\frac {1}{(x+1){\sqrt {x}}}}}$ 

The orthogonality of the Chebyshev rational functions may be written:

${\displaystyle \int _{0}^{\infty }R_{m}(x)\,R_{n}(x)\,\omega (x)\,\mathrm {d} x={\frac {\pi c_{n}}{2}}\delta _{nm}}$ 

where c_n = 2 for n = 0 and c_n = 1 for n ≥ 1; δ_nm is the Kronecker delta function.

For an arbitrary function f(x) ∈ L²
_ω the orthogonality relationship can be used to expand f(x):

${\displaystyle f(x)=\sum _{n=0}^{\infty }F_{n}R_{n}(x)}$ 

where

${\displaystyle F_{n}={\frac {2}{c_{n}\pi }}\int _{0}^{\infty }f(x)R_{n}(x)\omega (x)\,\mathrm {d} x.}$ 

${\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}R_{0}(x)&=1\\R_{1}(x)&={\frac {x-1}{x+1}}\\R_{2}(x)&={\frac {x^{2}-6x+1}{(x+1)^{2}}}\\R_{3}(x)&={\frac {x^{3}-15x^{2}+15x-1}{(x+1)^{3}}}\\R_{4}(x)&={\frac {x^{4}-28x^{3}+70x^{2}-28x+1}{(x+1)^{4}}}\\R_{n}(x)&=(x+1)^{-n}\sum _{m=0}^{n}(-1)^{m}{\binom {2n}{2m}}x^{n-m}\end{aligned}}}$ 

${\displaystyle R_{n}(x)=\sum _{m=0}^{n}{\frac {(m!)^{2}}{(2m)!}}{\binom {n+m-1}{m}}{\binom {n}{m}}{\frac {(-4)^{m}}{(x+1)^{m}}}}$ 

• Guo, Ben-Yu; Shen, Jie; Wang, Zhong-Qing (2002). "Chebyshev rational spectral and pseudospectral methods on a semi-infinite interval" (PDF). Int. J. Numer. Methods Eng. 53 (1): 65–84. Bibcode:2002IJNME..53...65G. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.121.6069. doi:10.1002/nme.392. S2CID 9208244. Retrieved 2006-07-25.