Sampling discretization of the uniform norm and applications

Discretization of the uniform norm of functions from a given finite dimensional subspace of continuous functions is studied. Previous known results show that for any $N$-dimensional subspace of the space of continuous functions it is sufficient to use $e^{CN}$ sample points for an accurate upper bound for the uniform norm by the discrete norm and that one cannot improve on the exponential growth of the number of sampling points for a good discretization theorem in the uniform norm. In this paper we focus on two types of results, which allow us to obtain good discretization of the uniform norm with polynomial in $N$ number of points. In the first way we weaken the discretization inequality by allowing a bound of the uniform norm by the discrete norm multiplied by an extra factor, which may depend on $N$. In the second way we impose restrictions on the finite dimensional subspace under consideration. In particular, we prove a general result, which connects the upper bound on the number of sampling points in the discretization theorem for the uniform norm with the best $m$-term bilinear approximation of the Dirichlet kernel associated with the given subspace.