Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2015/prelims/mathematics-v/4/c/solution

Take . It vanishes at both endpoints. Its odd periodic extension is continuously differentiable across the joins, whereas its even extension has corners because and are nonzero.
Two integrations by parts, with , give
The Fourier coefficients are therefore
The Fourier sine series has a uniform absolute tail , and each of its partial sums satisfies both zero boundary values exactly. The Fourier cosine series has an absolute tail bound ; at its omitted even-index Fourier coefficients have the same sign and yield an error of order . This verifies a strictly faster uniform error bound for the sine approximation in this example.

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