technique and if you think of even what wavelets are they're really just a dyadic grid approximation type of spline so what we're going to focus on today is a particular family of splines that we call we don't call that we're kind maxify splines by Stephen Boyd a number of years ago and these were developed just for the idea of approximating a convex function with a continuous piecewise affine approximation okay so let's do continue with this really simple example to just define a max of fine spline we're interested in approximating