 Forced Airy boundary-value problem

On the unit interval, the weak form is $a(u,v)={\int }_0^{1}fv$, with $a(u,v)={\int }_0^1(u^{\prime }{v}^{\prime }+xuv)$ on the zero-boundary Sobolev space. The nonnegative potential makes this form coercive in the derivative norm, and the Poincaré inequality makes that norm equivalent to the Sobolev norm. The Lax-Milgram theorem gives a unique solution. A conforming Ritz method minimizes the corresponding strictly convex quadratic energy and produces a symmetric positive-definite tridiagonal matrix for piecewise-linear hats.