Sampling recovery in the uniform norm

We study the recovery of functions in the uniform norm based on function evaluations. We obtain worst case error bounds for general classes of functions, also in $L_p$-norm, in terms of the best $L_2$-approximation from a given nested sequence of subspaces combined with bounds on the the Christoffel function of these subspaces. Our results imply that linear sampling algorithms are optimal (up to constants) among all algorithms using arbitrary linear information for many reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces; a result that has been observed independently in [Geng \& Wang, arXiv:2304.14748].