This volume is derived from invited talks given at a meeting celebrating Michael Powell's sixtieth birthday and focuses on innovative work in optimization and approximation theory. The individual papers, written by leading authorities in their subjects, are a mix of expository articles and surveys on new work. They have all been reviewed and edited to form a coherent volume that represents the state of the art in an important discipline within mathematics, with highly relevant applications throughout science and engineering.

It is necessary to estimate parameters by approximation and interpolation in many areas-from computer graphics to inverse methods to signal processing. Radial basis functions are modern, powerful tools which are being used more widely as the limitations of other methods become apparent. Martin Buhmann provides a complete analysis of radial basic functions from the theoretical and practical implementation viewpoints. He also includes a comprehensive bibliography.

The current form of modern approximation theory is shaped by many new de velopments which are the subject of this series of conferences. The International Meetings on Approximation Theory attempt to keep track in particular of fun damental advances in the theory of function approximation, for example by (or thogonal) polynomials, (weighted) interpolation, multivariate quasi-interpolation, splines, radial basis functions and several others. This includes both approxima tion order and error estimates, as well as constructions of function systems for approximation of functions on Euclidean...

A collection of papers by international contributors describing new developments in the fields of univariate and multivariate approximation theory. This research has applications in areas such as computer-aided geometric design, as applied in engineering and medical technology (e.g. computerized tomography).