On the representation of smooth functions on the sphere using finitely many bits (Q1780689)

The paper deals with approximation of smooth functions defined on the \(q\)-dimensional Euclidean sphere \(S^q\) by polynomial operators. Let \({\mathcal P}_l(t)\) be the Legendre polynomial of degree \(l\) and let \(h(t)\) be some \([0, \infty) \to {\mathbb R}\) function vanishing for sufficiently large \(t\). For \(t \in {\mathbb R}\) and \(n=0,1,\ldots\), let \[ \Phi_n(t)=\sum_{l=0}^\infty h(l/2^n) {d_l^q \over \omega_q}{\mathcal P}_l(t), \] where \(d_l^q\) is the linear dimension of the set of all spherical harmonics of degree \(l\) and \(\omega_q\) is the volume of \(S^q\). Given a sequence \(\{\mu_n\}\) of signed Borel measures on \(S^q\), the summability operator is defined by \[ \sigma_n(f, {\mathbf x})=\int_{S_q} \Phi_n ({\mathbf x}\cdot \xi)\,d\mu_n(\xi). \] The difference \(\tau_n(f)=\sigma_n(f)-\sigma_{n-1}(f)\) is the polynomial frame operator. The most interesting cases are when \(\mu_n\) are the volume measures on \(S^q\) for all \(n\) and when \(\mu_n\) are the so-called M-Z quadrature measures. In the latter case, the author proves that under certain uniformity conditions \(f=\sum_{n=0}^\infty \tau_n(f)\), with the series convergent in the sense of \(L_p(S^q)\). Various properties of this expansion are proved. In particular, by uniform quantization of the values of polynomial operators one can obtain a bit coding of functions \(f\) from the Besov classes, with the number of bits that is within only a logarithmic factor of their metric entropy. Moreover, the coding has a localization property: from the total set of bits one can identify for each spherical cap a certain subset of bits that represents the function on this cap. The cardinality of this subset depends on the local smoothness of the function and the volume of the cap.