A note on the limited stability of surface spline interpolation

Given a finite subset Ξ ⊂ R and data |Ξ , the surface spline interpolant to the data |Ξ is a function s which minimizes a certain seminorm subject to the interpolation conditions |Ξ = |Ξ . It is known that surface spline interpolation is stable on the Sobolev space W in the sense that ‖s‖L∞(Ω) ≤ const ‖f‖Wm , where m is an integer parameter which specifies the surface spline. In this note we show that surface spline interpolation is not stable on W γ whenever γ < m− 1/2.