Notation. Let us instate several pieces of notation that are carried throughout the paper. For
p ∈[1, ∞], we write · p for the usual ?p vector norm. We reserve the symbol · for the spectral
norm, i.e., the natural norm on linear maps from ?2 to ?2.
Suppose that x is a signal in CN and r is a positive integer. We write xr for the signal in CN that
is formed by restricting x to its r largest-magnitude components. Ties are broken lexicographically.
This signal is a best r-sparse approximation to x with respect to any ?p norm. Suppose now that
T is a subset of {1, 2, ... , N }. We define the restriction of the signal to the set T as