Weak type inequalities for best simultaneous approximation in Banach spaces

For arbitrary Banach spaces Butter and Scherer in 1968 showed that the approximation order of best approximation call characterized by the order of certain K-functionals. This general theorem has many applications such as the characterization of the best approximation of algebraic polynomials by moduli of smoothness involving the Legendre, Chebyshev, or more general the Jacobi transform. In this paper we introduce a family of seminorms on the underlying approximation space which leads to a generalization of the Butzer-Scherer theorems. Now the characterization of the weighted best algebraic approximation in terms of the so-called main part modulus of Ditzian and Totik is included in our frame as another particular application. The goal of the paper is to show that for the characterization of the orders of best approximation. simultaneous approximation (in different spaces), reduction theorems, and K-functionals one has (essentially) only to verify three types of inequalities, namely inequalities of Jackson-, Bernstein-type and an equivalence condition which guarantees the equivalence of the seminorm and the underlying norm on certain subspaces. All the results are given in weak-type estimates for almost arbitrary approximation orders, the proofs use only functional analytic methods. (C) 1999 Academic Press.