Positive results and counterexamples in comonotone approximation. II. (Q2636659)

This paper contains a comprehensive study on the uniform approximation of piecewise monotone functions in \(C[-1,1]\) by means of polynomials that exhibit the same behavior. More precisely, let \(Y_s=\{y_i\}_{i=1}^s\) with \(y_0=-1<y_1<\dots<y_s<1=y_{s+1}\). It is said that \(f\in \Delta^{(1)}(Y_s)\) when \(f\) is nondecreasing on \([y_s,1]\), nonincreasing on \([y_{s-1},y_s]\) and so on. Thus, \(f\in \Delta^{(1)}\) if there exists \(Y_s\) such that \(f\in \Delta^{(1)}(Y_s)\). The best comonotone approximation of \(f\) relative to \(Y_s\) is \[ E^{(1)}_n(f,Y_s)=\inf_{P_n\in \mathbb{P}_n \cap \Delta^{(1)}(Y_s)}\|f-P_n\|, \] where \(\|\cdot\|\) stands for the uniform norm. Let \(E_n(f)\) be the best uniform approximation of \(f\) by means of polynomials of degree \(<n\). The main result is the following. Given a triple \((\alpha,s,N)\), \(\alpha>0\), \(s,N\in \mathbb{N}\), it is proved that there exists a constant \(c(\alpha,s,N)\) such that for all \(f\in \Delta^{(1)}(Y_s)\), with \(n^\alpha E_n(f)\leq 1\), \(n\geq N\), the estimate \(n^\alpha E^{(1)}_n(f,Y_s)\leq c(\alpha,s,N)\), \(n\geq N^*\), holds true for some \(N^*\), where the dependence of \(N^*\) on \(f\), \(Y_s\), \(s\), \(\alpha\) and \(N\) is described in great detail.