Some properties of periodic B-spline collocation matrices

In three recent papers by Cavaretta ef al., progress has been made in understanding the structure of bi-infinite totally positive matrices which have a block Toeplitz structure. The motivation for these papers came from certain problems of infinite spline interpolation where total positivity played an important role. In this paper, we re-examine a class of infinite spline interpolation problems. We derive new results concerning the associated infinite matrices (periodic B-spline collocation matrices) which go beyond consequences of the general theory. Among other things, we identify the dimension of the null space of these matrices as the width of the largest band of strictly positive elements. © 1983, Royal Society of Edinburgh. All rights reserved.