1. Introduction
Appell polynomials are one of the largest class of polynomials. The classical Appell polynomials comprise the Bernoulli, Euler, Appell-Hermite, generalized Bernoulli, and generalized Euler polynomials, as well as other examples in [
1,
2,
3,
4].
The sequence of Appell polynomials  is defined by either of the following identities:
	  where  denotes the Appell numbers.
According to the alternative definition in [
3], the sequence of Appell polynomials 
 for 
 can be equivalently defined by
      
      where the generating function satisfies 
, and thus (
1) is identical to (ii).
Appell polynomials appear in various problems in pure and applied mathematics related to differential equations, approximation theory, interpolation, and summation methods. More examples may be found in [
1,
2,
5,
6] (and references therein). Moreover, in theoretical applications, degenerate versions of Appell polynomials 
 of a complex variable 
 have been extensively studied [
7,
8,
9,
10,
11]. These polynomials are defined by the generating functions
      
      where 
 and 
 are obtained from the degenerate exponential functions. That is, the exponential functions 
 and 
 are replaced by 
 and 
, respectively:
Here, it is noted that 
 and 
, because 
 as 
. Since Carlitz in [
12,
13] introduced degenerate formulas for special numbers and polynomials, the degenerate complex Appell polynomials have been extensively studied to find useful properties and identities. Specifically, degenerate Bernoulli and Euler polynomials of complex variables were introduced in [
12], whereas degenerate gamma functions and Laplace transforms were introduced in [
14], and their modifications in [
9]. The study of degenerate versions of known special numbers and polynomials provides several useful identities and related properties. Although the original sequence 
 satisfies conditions (i) and (ii), the sequence 
 of degenerate polynomials no longer satisfies these conditions.
To retain the crucial properties of the Appell sequence, we introduce a new type of degenerate Appell polynomials, which are obtained by partially degenerate generating functions. Some examples are provided in 
Table 1. The aim of this paper is to present degenerate complex Appell polynomials and some of their properties. In particular, using degenerate Appell polynomials, we derive the differential equations satisfied by certain degenerate complex polynomials based on the quasi-monomiality principle.
The paper is organized as follows. In 
Section 2, we introduce degenerate complex Appell polynomials with cosine- and sine-Appell polynomials and prove some of their properties and relations. 
Section 3 presents illustrative examples of differential equations satisfied by degenerate complex Appell polynomials. Finally, 
Section 4 concludes the paper.
  2.  Degenerate Complex Appell Polynomials
In this section, we introduce degenerate complex Appell polynomials based on degenerate generating functions and study some of their properties. Furthermore, cosine- and sine-Appell polynomials are presented by splitting the complex Appell polynomials into their real ℜ and imaginary ℑ parts. We first provide the definition of degenerate Appell polynomials.
Definition 1. We define the sequence  of degenerate complex Appell polynomials using the generating functionwhere  denotes the degenerate Appell numbers. Here, the degenerate generating functions , which correspond to  in the Appell polynomials (1), are obtained by the degenerate exponential function , which corresponds to the standard exponential function  in  (see, for example, Table 1).  Remark 1.  1. Clearly, the first degenerate Appell number  is nonzero and is independent of λ as  by definition (ii);
2. The sequence  satisfies conditions (i) and (ii);
3. For , the sequence  satisfiesas the identity for  can be obtained by the binomial convolution of the sequences  and .  On the basis of the degenerate complex Appell polynomials, we split complex values into real and imaginary parts using Euler’s formula.
Definition 2. For a nonnegative integer n, we define the degenerate cosine-Appell polynomials  and the degenerate sine-Appell polynomials  by the following generating functions:  By Definitions 1 and 2, it follows that for 
,
      
The degenerate trigonometric functions  and  have the following property.
Theorem 1. For  and ,  and  in (3) can be represented in terms of  and  as follows:  Proof.  The proof follows easily by comparing the coefficients in the polynomial expansion in (1) and (2), and by using Euler’s formula . □
 Remark 2. It is noted that the sequences  and  can be explicitly determined when  is given. For example, for  and  as defined in Table 1, the first five polynomials can be listed as in Table 2 and Table 3. One can verify that from [7], , , , and . Moreover, Equation (4) holds.  We now provide an expression of  and  as well as some of their properties.
Theorem 2. Let n be a non-negative integer. Then, the following identities hold: where  represents the greatest integer less than or equal to n.
 Proof.  By considering the product of  and , the identity for  is easily obtained by the binomial convolution of the sequences  and . Similarly, the identity for  can be obtained by the binomial convolution of the sequences  and . □
 Theorem 3. If we let  for some sequence , then the followings hold:  Proof.  We only prove the first formula, as the proof of the second is similar. We consider the product 
. First, using the binomial convolution of the sequences 
 and 
, we have that 
 is the exponential generating function of the sequence
        
Then, by rewriting the product 
 as
        
        and using the binomial convolution of the sequences 
 and 
, we obtain that 
 is the exponential generating function of the sequence
        
Thus, the first identity is proved. □
 Before providing an example of Theorem 3, we note that the 
-falling factorial sequence 
 is given by the degenerate exponential function as follows [
10,
15]:
      where
      
Example 1. Type 2 degenerate Euler polynomials  are defined by the generating functions One can verify that the identities in Theorem 3 hold because .
 We now show that the degenerate cosine- and sine-Appell polynomials ( and ) are represented by the Stirling numbers of the second kind .
Theorem 4. For , the degenerate cosine- and sine-Appell polynomials satisfy  Proof.  We first note that 
 is the exponential generating function of the sequence 
. Then, considering the product 
 and 
, the binomial convolution of the sequences 
 and 
 implies that 
 is the exponential generating function of the sequence
        
Similarly, by the binomial convolution of the sequences 
 and 
, we have that 
 is the exponential generating function of the sequence
        
 □
 Recalling that 
 (see [
3,
16]), where 
 and 
 are the Stirling numbers of the second kind and the falling factorial, respectively, we have the following corollary.
Corollary 1. For , the following identities hold:  Example 2.  1. If , then we have the sequence  of the degenerate complex Euler polynomials in Table 1. Thus, the degenerate cosine- and sine-Euler polynomials can be obtained by 2. When , we obtain the sequence  of the degenerate complex Bernoulli polynomials in Table 1. Hence, the degenerate cosine- and sine-Bernoulli polynomials are given by  Remark 3. In particular, when  in Definition 1, we consider the cosine- and sine- sequences  and  given by (see [8]) Then, as  for  in Theorem 2, we have that  The following two theorems show that the degenerate complex Appell polynomials can be split into  and .
Theorem 5. For , the degenerate complex Appell polynomials are related to  and  as follows:  Proof.  As 
 is the exponential generating functions for 
, we immediately have (
5) by the binomial convolution of the sequences 
 and 
, as 
. □
 Theorem 6. For , the degenerate cosine- and sine-Appell polynomials have the following properties:  Proof.  Let us consider the trigonometric identities
        
We note that 
 and 
 in Remark 3. As 
 is the exponential generating function for 
, we obtain (
6) by the binomial convolutions. Equation (
7) can be proved similarly. □
 Theorem 7. For , the following identities for degenerate cosine- and sine-Appell polynomials hold:  Proof.  As 
 is the exponential generating function for 
, we obtain (
8) by the binomial convolution of the sequences 
 and 
. Similarly, (
9) can be proved. □
 As  is obtained by the binomial convolution of the sequences  and , we obtain the following corollary.
Corollary 2. For , the following identities for  and  hold:    3. Illustrative Examples of Differential Equations
In this section, we present two examples of degenerate complex Appell polynomials: the degenerate Bernoulli and Euler polynomials. By using quasi-monomiality, we derive the related differential equation satisfied by each of these polynomials. To this end, we first recall the definition of quasi-monomiality and some related properties.
By [
3,
17], a polynomial set 
 is called quasi-monomial if there exist two linear operators 
 and 
 such that
      
      where 
 and 
 are called the derivative and multiplication operators, respectively.
On the basis of the results related to the monomiality principle, the quasi-monomial polynomials 
 satisfy the following differential equation:
In particular, as the sequence 
 is Appell-type, we have (more details are in [
3]):  
      or equivalently,
      
  3.1. Degenerate complex Bernoulli polynomials 
The degenerate complex Bernoulli polynomials 
 are defined by the degenerate generating function 
. That is,
        
By simple computations, it is easily seen that the following expansion holds true:
        where the first six coefficients are the following:
As the operators for the degenerate complex Bernoulli polynomials 
 are given by
        
        the degenerate complex Bernoulli polynomials satisfy the following differential equation:
We note that for the degenerate complex Bernoulli polynomials 
 of degree 
n, the differential equation is equivalently expressed by
        
  3.2. Degenerate Complex Euler Polynomials  
The degenerate complex Euler polynomials 
 are given by the degenerate generating function 
. Equivalently,
        
The expansion for 
 is given by
        
        where the first six coefficients are the following:
As the operators for the degenerate complex Euler polynomials 
 are given by
        
        the differential equation of the degenerate complex Euler polynomials is
        
It is noted that for the degenerate complex Euler polynomials 
 of degree 
n, the differential equation is equivalently given by