Investigations on the approximability and computability of the Hilbert transform with applications

It was recently shown that on a large class of important Banach spaces there exist no linear methods which are able to approximate the Hilbert transform from samples of the given function. This implies that there is no linear algorithm for calculating the Hilbert transform which can be implemented on a digital computer and which converges for all functions from the corresponding Banach spaces. The present paper develops a much more general framework which also includes non-linear approximation methods. All algorithms within this framework have only to satisfy an axiom which guarantees the computability of the algorithm based on given samples of the function. The paper investigates whether there exists an algorithm within this general framework which converges to the Hilbert transform for all functions in these Banach spaces. It is shown that non-linear methods give actually no improvement over linear methods. Moreover, the paper discusses some consequences regarding the Turing computability of the Hilbert transform and the existence of computational bases in Banach spaces. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.