On the Gibbs Phenomenon and Its Resolution

Abstract

The nonuniform convergence of the Fourier series for discontinuous functions, and in particular the oscillatory behavior of the finite sum, was already analyzed by Wilbraham in 1848. This was later named the Gibbs phenomenon. This article is a review of the Gibbs phenomenon from a different perspective. The Gibbs phenomenon, as we view it, deals with the issue of recovering point values of a function from its expansion coefficients. Alternatively it can be viewed as the possibility of the recovery of local information from global information. The main theme here is not the structure of the Gibbs oscillations but the understanding and resolution of the phenomenon in a general setting. The purpose of this article is to review the Gibbs phenomenon and to show that the knowledge of the expansion coefficients is sufficient for obtaining the point values of a piecewise smooth function, with the same order of accuracy as in the smooth case. This is done by using the finite expansion series to construct a different, rapidly convergent, approximation.