An extremal problem for polynomials (Q5920280): Difference between revisions

The author considers the following special extremal problem for polynomials: how small can the sup-norm of a polynomial over the unit circle be if each of the coefficients is \(\pm 1\) times a fixed complex number with absolute value \(1\)? More precisely, let \[ B_n(\phi_0,\ldots,\phi_n):=\max\{\| \sum_{k=0}^{n-1} \epsilon_k e^{2\pi i \phi_k}z^k \|: \epsilon_0,\ldots,\epsilon_{n-1}\in \{-1,1\}\} \] where \(\phi_0,\ldots,\phi_{n-1}\in [0,1]\) are given and \(\|.\|\) denotes the sup norm over the unit circle. Furthermore, let \[ b(n):=\min\{B_n(\phi_0,\ldots,\phi_n): \phi_0,\ldots,\phi_{n-1}\in [0,1]\}. \] The author shows that \(b(n)/n\rightarrow 2/\pi\) in Theorem 1 by taking real parts and using cosine polynomials and the equidistribution of \(\{\alpha k^2\}_k\) where \(\{.\}\) denotes the fractional part and \(k\) runs over the positive integers. This result gives an answer in a special case to a general problem-class raised by Littlewood, Borwein, Erdélyi and others.