Lower semicontinuity of a Hölder seminorm 2026-10-06
If uniformly and the Hölder seminorms are uniformly bounded, each fixed difference quotient converges. Taking the supremum over point pairs gives . The supremum norms converge, so the full Hölder norm has the same lower semicontinuity of a Hölder seminorm.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2017 iii Paper 107 4 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-05
Use the paper's classical norm convention: is the derivative supremum norm through order two, not an norm. Write and , where the latter is the full Hölder norm of the forcing.
Fix . If the asserted estimate failed, rescaling the functions by their global Hessian matrix Hölder seminorm would produce withIn particular . Choose for whichThe supremum norm of tends to zero, so . Let be the quadratic Taylor polynomial of at , and defineThe domains contain , and vanish at zero. MoreoverThe right side is bounded by and tends to zero locally uniformly. The normalized Hessian matrix bound controls ; integration along line segments then bounds on every compact Euclidean ball. Arzela-Ascoli theorem and a diagonal subsequence argument give convergence in on compact subsets to an entire harmonic function , with and .
After a further subsequence with . The normalization ensures . But each second derivative of is harmonic and has finite global Hölder seminorm with exponent below one. The supplied Liouville theorem makes each derivative constant; it is the globally Hölder case of the polynomial-growth Liouville theorem for harmonic functions. Its value at zero makes it zero, a contradiction. This blow-up compactness proof of an interior Schauder estimate establishes
To absorb the term on the larger Euclidean ball, rescale this estimate to Euclidean balls contained in . For , pairs separated by less than are controlled in a Euclidean ball centred at their first point; farther pairs are controlled directly by . ThusThis is the covering step in the Simon absorption lemma. Take and fix . Iterating makes the remainder tend to zero, since the global seminorm is finite; the error terms form a convergent geometric series. Consequently
For the requested failure of the weaker estimate, take and . The derivative supremum norm and remain bounded, but comparison at and , both in for large , givesThis proves the necessity of Hölder forcing for Schauder estimates. Every member of the sequence is smooth; failure comes from the increasing frequency, not from any lack of individual regularity.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2017 iii Paper 340 2 d Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
Let bound the piecewise Hölder norms, and let . At scale , classify a wavelet as bad when its localized support of a function meets a discontinuity, and as good otherwise. Compact support and bounded overlap imply at most bad wavelets per scale and at most total wavelets. A good support lies in a single smooth piece, so the preceding wavelet coefficient decay for Hölder functions gives . The permitted bounded-function estimate gives for bad coefficients.
Consider a specific N-term approximation: retain all coarse scaling functions and all wavelets through scale , and also retain the bad coefficients at scales , where . Since , for large . Its term count is bounded byBy the Parseval identity, its squared L2 norm error is the sum of omitted squared coefficients. The good tail satisfiesand the remaining bad tail satisfiesChoose with a fixed sufficiently large ; then the extra terms fit the remaining budget for all sufficiently large , while is comparable to . Padding to terms does not increase the error. The best N-term approximation is at least as accurate as this constructed selection, soThe constant may depend on the finite number of jumps, the piecewise Hölder norms, and the fixed wavelet family. Values exactly at the jumps are immaterial in . The improvement comes from retaining only a bounded number of jump-crossing coefficients at each finer scale, as in best N-term wavelet approximation of piecewise Hölder functions.