Best Approximation In Inner Product Spaces

Best Approximation in Inner Product Spaces

This book evolved from notes originally developed for a graduate course, "Best Approximation in Normed Linear Spaces," that I began giving at Penn State Uni versity more than 25 years ago. It soon became evident. that many of the students who wanted to take the course (including engineers, computer scientists, and statis ticians, as well as mathematicians) did not have the necessary prerequisites such as a working knowledge of Lp-spaces and some basic functional analysis. (Today such material is typically contained in the first-year graduate course in analysis. ) To accommodate these students, I usually ended up spending nearly half the course on these prerequisites, and the last half was devoted to the "best approximation" part. I did this a few times and determined that it was not satisfactory: Too much time was being spent on the presumed prerequisites. To be able to devote most of the course to "best approximation," I decided to concentrate on the simplest of the normed linear spaces-the inner product spaces-since the theory in inner product spaces can be taught from first principles in much less time, and also since one can give a convincing argument that inner product spaces are the most important of all the normed linear spaces anyway. The success of this approach turned out to be even better than I had originally anticipated: One can develop a fairly complete theory of best approximation in inner product spaces from first principles, and such was my purpose in writing this book.

Best Approximation in Inner Product Spaces

Theoretical Numerical Analysis

This textbook prepares graduate students for research in numerical analysis/computational mathematics by giving to them a mathematical framework embedded in functional analysis and focused on numerical analysis. This helps the student to move rapidly into a research program. The text covers basic results of functional analysis, approximation theory, Fourier analysis and wavelets, iteration methods for nonlinear equations, finite difference methods, Sobolev spaces and weak formulations of boundary value problems, finite element methods, elliptic variational inequalities and their numerical solution, numerical methods for solving integral equations of the second kind, and boundary integral equations for planar regions. The presentation of each topic is meant to be an introduction with certain degree of depth. Comprehensive references on a particular topic are listed at the end of each chapter for further reading and study. Because of the relevance in solving real world problems, multivariable polynomials are playing an ever more important role in research and applications. In this third editon, a new chapter on this topic has been included and some major changes are made on two chapters from the previous edition. In addition, there are numerous minor changes throughout the entire text and new exercises are added. Review of earlier edition: "...the book is clearly written, quite pleasant to read, and contains a lot of important material; and the authors have done an excellent job at balancing theoretical developments, interesting examples and exercises, numerical experiments, and bibliographical references." R. Glowinski, SIAM Review, 2003