Dimension hopping and families of strictly positive definite zonal basis functions on spheres (Q2399763)

The authors investigate certain dimension hopping operators on spheres \(\mathbb{S}^d\) that preserve strict and non-strict positive definiteness of zonal functions. Using the montée operator for the sphere \(\mathbb{S}^d\) together with some known strictly positive definite, zonal functions, further families of locally supported, strictly positive zonal functions are constructed. For computational purposes, it proves useful that these new functions can be evaluated at relatively low computational cost.