The endpoint chord is . Since the square-root function is concave, the gap is nonnegative. Put to obtain , whose maximum is at , or .
Shift the chord upward by half that maximum. Then
The errors at are respectively . These are three alternating extrema, so equioscillation proves optimality and uniqueness for linear polynomials. This is minimax linear approximation of a square-root endpoint profile.
Figure 1.
Shifting the chord by one eighth creates three alternating errors
. Details.