Dirichlet kernel

In mathematical analysis, the Dirichlet kernel, named after the German mathematician Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, is the collection of periodic functions defined as

$${\displaystyle D_{n}(x)=\sum _{k=-n}^{n}e^{ikx}=\left(1+2\sum _{k=1}^{n}\cos(kx)\right)={\frac {\sin \left(\left(n+1/2\right)x\right)}{\sin(x/2)}},}$$ where n is any positive integer. The kernel functions are periodic with period ${\displaystyle 2\pi }$.

The importance of the Dirichlet kernel comes from its relation to Fourier series. The convolution of D_n(x) with any function f of period 2π is the nth-degree Fourier series approximation to f, i.e., we have $${\displaystyle (D_{n}*f)(x)=\int _{-\pi }^{\pi }f(y)D_{n}(x-y)\,dy=2\pi \sum _{k=-n}^{n}{\hat {f}}(k)e^{ikx},}$$ where $${\displaystyle {\widehat {f}}(k)={\frac {1}{2\pi }}\int _{-\pi }^{\pi }f(x)e^{-ikx}\,dx}$$ is the kth Fourier coefficient of f. This implies that in order to study convergence of Fourier series it is enough to study properties of the Dirichlet kernel.