Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2001 iii Paper 58 3 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
The Korovkin theorem says that a sequence of positive linear operators on continuous functions on converges uniformly to the identity on every continuous function if it does so on , and . Necessity is immediate; the quadratic barrier argument establishing sufficiency is given in Solution 6.
There is an endpoint misprint in the original PDF: the repeated knots at the right end must equal , not . Otherwise the advertised nondecreasing spline knot sequence on does not exist. Use the corrected clamped spline knot sequences, with fixed order and maximum gap . Let denote the number of B-splines for the th sequence. Nonnegativity and partition of unity show that the Schoenberg spline operator is positive and .
The monomial B-spline coefficients reproduce the first two nonconstant test polynomials. PutThe pair sum uses , as in the PDF; the converted TeX incorrectly includes . Every sampling point and every knot entering these coefficients lie in , whose length is at most . Thus . Also all these numbers belong to , soThe positive B-spline weights giveTogether with , the three limits proveUnder the usual interior knot multiplicities at most , the splines are continuous and the quoted form of the Korovkin theorem applies directly. If full interior multiplicity is allowed, the output can be discontinuous. The same positive-operator quadratic barrier proof still works with bounded output functions and the supremum norm, and proves exactly the stated uniform error limit without asserting continuity of each output. Indeed the stronger local-support error bound for a Schoenberg spline operator, , follows by comparing with each active sample value. The restriction is needed for the displayed quadratic reproduction argument, not for this direct support estimate.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2008 iii Paper 75 2 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
The Korovkin theorem states that if positive linear operators on continuous functions satisfythen 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 coefficientswhereThe 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 haveAveraging gives . Nonnegative weights of sum one now yieldHere the spline order is fixed, so all three errors tend to zero. The Korovkin theorem therefore provesNo 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.