Chebyshev blossoming in Müntz spaces: toward shaping with Young diagrams (Q1946201)

In 1989 \textit{L. Ramshaw} [Comput. Aided Geom. Des. 6, No. 4, 323--358 (1989; Zbl 0705.65008)] introduced the notion of polynomial blossom. Blossom gives an elegant and unifying approach to the study and understanding of many aspects of the theory of polynomial curves. In the 1990s an extension of the polynomial blossom to the extended Chebyshev spaces was introduced. A special class of these spaces are the Müntz spaces, which gain attention in design because they offer shape parameters. The paper relates Chebyshev blossoming in Müntz spaces with the theory of Schur functions to show the study of the concepts related to the notion of Chebyshev-Bézier curves in Müntz spaces. At the beginning the authors review the basic properties of Chebyshev blossoming which later are used in the paper. Next, in section 3, the Chen iterated integral is introduced. The integral allows to give a determinantal expression for the Chebyshev blossom of Chebyshev functions, which is used in later sections. In section 4 the authors give some relevant properties of Schur functions (combinatorial definition of Schur functions, the Giambelli formula, the hook-length formula, skew Schur functions and branching rules). Later, expression for the Chebyshev blossom of Müntz spaces with integer exponents in terms of Schur functions is given. Examples of Müntz spaces (polynomial, combinatorial, elementary, complete, hook, staircase) are introduced in section 6. Next, in section 7 the authors give an expression for the pseudo-affinity property in terms of Schur functions. For this purpose they used the Dodgson condensation formula. The expression from section 7 is a fundamental in deriving an explicit expression for the Chebyshev-Bernstein basis in any Müntz space with integer exponents. The derivation is introduced in section 8 and is divided into two steps. In the first step the de Castlejau algorithm is used to gain information on the derivatives of these bases, and then in the second step using the dimension elevation and some combinatorial manipulations on nested Müntz spaces the explicit expression is obtained. In section 9 a simple algorithm for the dimension elevation process is given. Next, the authors discuss the idea of using Young diagrams as shape parameters for free-form design. Moreover, the problem of continuity of composite Chebyshev-Bézier curves is discussed, and an expression for the derivative of the Chebyshev-Bernstein basis is given.