 Ill-posedness of numerical differentiation

Recovering a derivative from values controlled only in the uniform norm is an ill-posed problem: the differentiation map is not continuous in those norms. On $[0,1]$, take $f_k(x)=\sin (kx)/k$. Then $\Vert f_k{\Vert }_{\infty }\le 1/k\to 0$, while $f_k^{\prime }(x)=\cos (kx)$ has uniform norm one for every $k$. Arbitrarily small value perturbations can therefore conceal nonvanishing derivative changes.

Numerical differentiation can still be useful when additional smoothness bounds, a suitable sampling scale, or a regularization method control the admissible changes. The basic noise amplification by differentiation of a linear interpolant gives a finite-data version: endpoint uncertainty of size $\delta$ produces derivative uncertainty of order $\delta /h$ at spacing $h$.