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For the Euclidean norm, rotational symmetry and minimizing the radial objective give the radial soft thresholding formulaIndeed, if $r=\Vert x{\Vert }_2$, an optimal $u$ is a nonnegative scalar multiple of $x$; minimizing $s+(r-s{)}^2/(2\tau )$ over $s\ge 0$ gives $s=(r-\tau {)}_{+}$. The gradient of a Moreau envelope is consequentlyAt $x=0$ this is $\{0\}$, and the two expressions agree when $\Vert x{\Vert }_2=\tau$. The Moreau envelope of the Euclidean norm itself isThus a quadratic core replaces the nondifferentiable tip while the outer gradient remains the normalized radial direction. The Euclidean norm has an unbounded effective domain, unlike the earlier bounded-domain hypothesis; the preceding argument explicitly shows that this restriction is unnecessary here.

For convex optimization, this Moreau–Yosida regularisation permits gradient descent and other methods for functions with a Lipschitz gradient, using a gradient Lipschitz constant $1/\tau$. It approximates the norm uniformly: $0\le \Vert x{\Vert }_2-f_{\tau }(x)\le \tau /2$. Smaller $\tau$ improves approximation but makes the permitted gradient steps smaller. Minimizing $f_{\tau }$ alone preserves the minimizers and minimum value of $f$; replacing one term in a larger objective can shift the minimizer, so the smoothing parameter controls that approximation error.