Minimal roughness property of the Delaunay triangulation (Q751165)

A set of scattered data in the plane consists of function values measured on a set of data points in \({\mathbb{R}}^ 2\). A surface model is obtained by triangulating the set of data points and constructing the piecewise linear interpolating surface (PLIS) to the given function values. The roughness measure of a PLIS is the \(L^ 2\) norm squared of the gradient of the surface, integrated over the triangulated region. The author proves that the Delaunay triangulation of the data points minimizes the roughness measure of a PLIS, for any fixed set of values of the function.