Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2004 iii Paper 71 4 2 b Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
The centered quadratic spline interpolation matrix is the symmetric tridiagonal Toeplitz matrixFor , this means simply . To evaluate the inverse norm exactly, let and . If is the nonnegative adjacency matrix of the path, then and . The convergent Neumann seriestherefore has nonnegative entries. Since , its entrywise absolute values are . Let . Then , orThe homogeneous characteristic roots are . Put . The particular solution and the two boundary conditions giveThese row sums are symmetric and increase toward the centre: the exponential sum in the numerator is minimized at the middle integer or pair of integers. With , the exact finite-size inverse norm is thusFor example it equals at and at , tending to as . Stating only the bound two would not evaluate the finite matrix norm requested here.