Maximum-norm bound for spline projection Created 2026-10-06 Updated 2026-10-07
For the orthogonal B-spline projector , the normal equations in the mixed-normalization spline Gram matrix give , with . Positivity and unit integral of imply . Nonnegativity and subpartition of unity of give . Hence , where the matrix norm is maximum absolute row sum. The range is the spline space, which lies in only for continuous splines.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2015 iii Paper 69 6 2 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
Use the standard partition normalization of B-splines, not rescaling each spline to have supremum exactly one. Let . Then . In the ordinary real inner product, the mixed-normalization spline Gram matrix is , where and . Since the form a basis, is positive definite; is invertible, so is invertible. The undeclared upper index in the printed matrix should be .
We need the standard positivity and normalization properties with their justification. The Cox-de Boor recurrence iswith zero-width terms interpreted as zero. It starts from nonnegative interval indicators. On each lower-order spline's support, its recurrence coefficients are nonnegative, so induction gives . Extend the finite knots outside their endpoints to a full knot sequence. In the full sum, coefficients of each lower-order spline add to one, so the recurrence preserves partition of unity. Our finite collection is a subset of nonnegative B-splines; therefore everywhere. The Marsden identity gives equality on the basic knot interval.
The divided-difference definition also gives support in : below the left endpoint the knot-data function is a polynomial of degree , whose order- divided difference vanishes; above the right endpoint the knot data vanish. Choose and . Integrating in and then taking the divided difference in its knot variable givesbecause an order- divided difference of a monic degree- polynomial is one. The support lies inside , so .
Orthogonality of to the spline space gives , with . Since and has unit integral, . The induced matrix maximum norm is the absolute row-sum norm, soTaking the supremum over nonzero proves the maximum-norm bound for spline projection:The range is , so the printed phrase “onto ” must mean into , and onto . Continuity of the range requires continuous B-splines, for example and internal multiplicities at most . For order-one or discontinuous B-splines, the same bound is valid with codomain rather than .