Use multiplier for . The Lagrangian is
The infimum over is finite exactly when . The infimum over occurs at , and hence
The dual is . Since the primal objective is coercive, the explicit Slater condition
is sufficient for feasibility, attainment, and equality of primal and dual values.
Associate a nonnegative Lagrange multiplier with each inequality. The Lagrangian dual problem begins with
Its infimum over is finite exactly when , in which case it equals . The dual linear program is consequently
For any primal-feasible and dual-feasible ,
which proves weak duality. Strong duality means equality of the two optimal values. The stated strict feasibility is the Slater condition; together with finiteness of the primal optimum it gives strong duality and an attained dual optimum .
The objective is strictly convex, so the minimizer is unique. The Slater condition makes the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions necessary and sufficient. Absorb the box constraints into the Euclidean projection onto a convex set and attach a scalar multiplier to . Stationarity over the box is equivalent to
while primal feasibility requires . Coordinatewise, these conditions are
They are also sufficient because they minimize the Lagrangian over the box and satisfy the equality constraint. Thus the projection onto a box-constrained hyperplane reduces to solving the displayed one-dimensional continuous, nonincreasing equation for . The multiplier need not be unique on a flat interval, but the projected vector is unique.