Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2013 iii Paper 36 4 c Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-07
The linear independence of the first elements of each orthonormal system shows that and have the same finite dimension and are closed subspaces of a Hilbert space. Apply part (b) with and . Since , the positive directed subspace angle cosine givesLet be the oblique projection onto along . Define . Its residual is orthogonal to every with , so the required measurements agree. Conversely, if has the same measurements, then ; uniqueness of the direct sum decomposition gives . Thus this is finite-dimensional Hilbert sampling reconstruction.
There is also an explicit coefficient description. Use the inner product convention linear in its first entry and putThen . The orthonormal systems show and , so the smallest singular value of is . Hence , another direct proof of existence and uniqueness.
For , both summands of this direct sum are nonzero: the infinite orthonormal system contains . The permitted oblique projection norm formula therefore applies without its degenerate exception, givingThe operator norm immediately yields the stability estimate . For the approximation bounds, put . Because fixes , we haveso the operator norm estimate gives . For the lower bound, while . The Pythagorean identity givesThe unique measurement-matching reconstruction is stable and within the secant function factor of the best orthogonal projection approximation:If a zero-dimensional reconstruction is admitted, it is simply and its error equals the norm of ; that case is best stated directly instead of using the angle of a zero space.