Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
The name ‘cardinal function’ was given to
by E. T. Whittaker (1), who considered it as a ‘smooth’ approximation to a function f(x), having the same values as f(x) at the points a + rw (r = 0, ± 1, ± 2, …). It has since been extensively studied (2), mainly from the point of view of interpolation theory. Hardy (3), however, observed that the functions νr(t) defined by
form a normal orthogonal set on the interval (−∞, ∞), for r = 0, ± 1, ± 2, …. This fact suggests a discussion of the cardinal series from the point of view of mean-square approximation.