Counting the dimension of splines of mixed smoothness. A general recipe, and its application to planar meshes of arbitrary topologies (Q2026138)

In this article, the authors study the dimension of the vector space of splines, or piecewise polynimial functions, of a fixed maximun polynomial degree and which are defined on planar polygonal partitions. The term ``mixed smoothness'' refers to the choice of different orders of smoothness across various edges of the partition. The approach follows the homological methods introduced to the study of splines in [\textit{L. J. Billera}, Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 310, No. 1, 325--340 (1988; Zbl 0718.41017)]. Starting from a spline space whose lower homology modules vanish, the authors present sufficient conditions that ensure that the same will be true for the spline space obtained after relaxing the smoothness conditions on certain edges of the partition. The results can be used to compute the dimensions of T-meshes with holes, therefore extending the results on mixed non-uniform bi-degree T-meshes presented in [\textit{D. Toshniwal} et al., Adv. Comput. Math. 47, No. 1, Paper No. 16, 42 p. (2021; Zbl 1473.13026)] and [\textit{D. Toshniwal} and \textit{N. Villamizar}, Comput. Aided Geom. Des. 80, Article ID 101880, 9 p. (2020; Zbl 1506.65032)].