Interpret the paper's unspecified as containing , the domain on which the coefficients are used. Write , a real symmetric matrix. The strict ellipticity condition is pointwise positive definiteness:The lower bound may depend on . By continuity, strict ellipticity gives a positive lower bound on each compact subset of , but does not require one bound throughout the whole open ball.
With the two-constant convention used in the next part, uniform ellipticity meansBoth constants are independent of . Some terminology uses uniform ellipticity for just the lower bound and states coefficient boundedness separately; here the paper supplies both constants. The spectral theorem for the symmetric matrix gives . For example, satisfies strict ellipticity in but has no uniform positive lower bound as .