Sharp a priori error estimates of the Rayleigh-Ritz method without assumptions of fixed sign or compactness (Q1081277)

The paper deals with an approximate solution of the eigenvalue problem as follows: find an \(u\in H\setminus \{0\}\), \(\lambda\in R\) such that (1) \(m(u,v)=\lambda l(u,v)\) holds for all \(v\in H\). Here H is a real separable Hilbert space with scalar product l and m is a bounded symmetric bilinear form on H. The approximate problem is given as a projection of (1) on a finite dimensional subspace \(\tilde U\subset H\) (this means that (1) is required to hold only for \(v\in \tilde U)\). After defining in a suitable manner the correspondence \(\lambda\leftrightarrow {\tilde \lambda}\) (\(\lambda\) the exact eigenvalue and \({\tilde \lambda}\) its approximation) the author proves two theorems estimating the error \(| \lambda -{\tilde \lambda}|\).