Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2023 / ii / Paper 4 / 12F / a / Solution

For $\mathbf{a},\mathbf{b}\in {\mathbb{R}}^{n+1}$, the triangle inequality and the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality giveThus $S$ is a continuous function. The unit sphere in the finite-dimensional Euclidean normed vector space ${\mathbb{R}}^{n+1}$ is compact. Moreover, $S(\mathbf{a})=0$ implies that the polynomial $T\mathbf{a}$ vanishes identically, so every coefficient $a_r$ is zero. Hence $S$ is strictly positive on the unit sphere. By the extreme value theorem, it has a positive minimum

The supremum norm is homogeneous. For $\mathbf{a}\ne 0$,It follows directly that $\Vert T\mathbf{a}{\Vert }_{\infty }\to \infty$ whenever $\Vert \mathbf{a}{\Vert }_2\to \infty$.

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