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$\mathcal O(n)$ working precision inverses for symmetric tridiagonal Toeplitz matrices with $\mathcal O(1)$ floating point calculations

A well known numerical task is the inversion of large symmetric tridiagonal Toeplitz matrices, i.e., matrices whose entries equal $a$ on the diagonal and $b$ on the extra diagonals ($a, b\in \mathbb R$). The inverses of such matrices are dense and there exist well known explicit formulas by which they can be calculated in $\mathcal O(n^2)$. In this note we present a simplification of the problem that has proven to be rather useful in everyday practice: If $\vert a\vert > 2\vert b\vert$, that is, if the matrix is strictly diagonally dominant, its inverse is a band matrix to working precision and the bandwidth is independent of $n$ for sufficiently large $n$. Employing this observation, we construct a linear time algorithm for an explicit tridiagonal inversion that only uses $\mathcal O(1)$ floating point operations. On the basis of this simplified inversion algorithm we outline the cornerstones for an efficient parallelizable approximative equation solver.