Convergence of Minimum Norm Elements of Projections and Intersections of Nested Affine Spaces in Hilbert Space

We consider a Hilbert space, an orthogonal projection onto a closed subspace and a sequence of downwardly directed affine spaces. We give sufficient conditions for the projection of the intersection of the affine spaces into the closed subspace to be equal to the intersection of their projections. Under a closure assumption, one such (necessary and) sufficient condition is that summation and intersection commute between the orthogonal complement of the closed subspace, and the subspaces corresponding to the affine spaces. Another sufficient condition is that the cosines of the angles between the orthogonal complement of the closed subspace, and the subspaces corresponding to the affine spaces, be bounded away from one. Our results are then applied to a general infinite horizon, positive semi-definite, linear quadratic, mathematical programming problem. Specifically, under suitable conditions, we show that optimal solutions exist and, modulo those feasible solutions with zero objective value, they are limits of optimal solutions to finite dimensional truncations of the original problem. ∗This author was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant DMI-0322114.