Optimal Approximation of Biquartic Polynomials by Bicubic Splines

Recently an unexpected approximation property between polynomials of degree three and four was revealed within the framework of two-part approximation models in 2-norm, Chebyshev norm and Holladay seminorm. Namely, it was proved that if a two-component cubic Hermite spline’s first derivative at the shared knot is computed from the first derivative of a quartic polynomial, then the spline is a clamped spline of class C2 and also the best approximant to the polynomial. Although it was known that a 2 × 2 component uniform bicubic Hermite spline is a clamped spline of class C2 if the derivatives at the shared knots are given by the first derivatives of a biquartic polynomial, the optimality of such approximation remained an open question. The goal of this paper is to resolve this problem. Unlike the spline curves, in the case of spline surfaces it is insufficient to suppose that the grid should be uniform and the spline derivatives computed from a biquartic polynomial. We show that the biquartic polynomial coefficients have to satisfy some additional constraints to achieve optimal approximation by bicubic splines