Generalized rational Chebyshev approximation

Abstract:

In this paper, a generalized rational Chebyshev approximation problem is considered. The problem is this: To minimize the maximum absolute value of the "criterion function" of the error. By imposing a rather natural restriction on the criterion function, the problem is solved completely; the existence, the uniqueness and the characterization of the best approximation are clarified and interesting relationships between the best approximations corresponding to different criterion functions are found. The theory is applied to the starting rational approximation for Newton iteration for ${x^{1/n}}$.