The stories told in this paper are dealing with the solution of finite, infinite, and biinfinite Toeplitz-type systems. A crucial role plays the off-diagonal decay behavior of Toeplitz matrices and their inverses. Classical results of Gelfand et al.\ on commutative Banach algebras yield a general characterization of this decay behavior. We then derive estimates for the approximate solution of (bi)infinite Toeplitz systems by the finite section method, showing that the approximation rate depends only on the decay of the entries of the Toeplitz matrix and its condition number. Furthermore, we give error estimates for the solution of doubly infinite convolution systems by finite circulant systems. Finally, some quantitative results on the construction of preconditioners via circulant embedding are derived, which allow to provide a theoretical explanation for numerical observations made by some researchers in connection with image deblurring.

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