Normalized Marsden dual functional Created 2026-10-07 Updated 2026-10-14
When the knot polynomial is normalized as , the displayed formula has no additional factorial prefactor. Applied to Marsden's identity, it extracts the coefficient of the corresponding B-spline in any polynomial of degree at most . Differentiating the finite sum makes adjacent terms cancel, proving independence of . For linear polynomials the coefficient is their value at the Greville abscissa.
The Korovkin theorem states that if positive linear operators on continuous functions satisfy
then for every real continuous function .
Let and . For the B-splines in this question, and their sum is one on the basic interval. Thus the Schoenberg spline operator is linear and positive. To verify the three test functions, suppress the index and write the Marsden identity with . Comparing the coefficients of gives the monomial B-spline coefficients
where
The first coefficient is the partition of unity; the second is the Greville abscissa. Every internal knot and the sample point lie in , of width at most . Consequently . Since all these numbers lie in , for any two internal knots we also have
Averaging gives . Nonnegative weights of sum one now yield
Here the spline order is fixed, so all three errors tend to zero. The Korovkin theorem therefore proves
No special selection such as the Greville abscissae is required for the sample points. In fact the local-support error bound for a Schoenberg spline operator also gives . Under the usual continuous-spline convention the operators have the codomain required by the stated theorem. If the permissive knot notation is taken to allow full interior multiplicities and hence discontinuous splines, the same conclusion in the uniform norm still follows from this direct bound, although each approximant need not then be continuous.