On one extremal property of a regular simplex (Q987904)

The purpose of this paper is to prove the optimality of a regular simplex in the problem of minimizing the best \((\alpha,\beta)\)-approximation in \(L_p\)-metric of quadratic function \(\sum^d_{j=1} x^2_j\) by linear functions. It is shown that the \(L_p\)-error of asymmetric linear approximation of the quadratic function \(Q(x)= \sum^d_{j=1} x^2_j\) on simplices in \(\mathbb{R}^d\) of fixed volume is minimized on regular simplices. It may be remarked that with the help of linear transformations, the solutions of the problem allows to obtain the solution of analogous optimization problems for an arbitrary positive definite quadratic form.