This book evolved from notes originally developed for a graduate course, "Best Approximation in Normed Linear Spaces," that I began giving at Penn State Uni versity more than 25 years ago. It soon became evident. that many of the students who wanted to take the course (including engineers, computer scientists, and statis ticians, as well as mathematicians) did not have the necessary prerequisites such as a working knowledge of Lp-spaces and some basic functional analysis. (Today such material is typically contained in the first-year graduate course in analysis. ) To accommodate these...

This book evolved from notes originally developed for a graduate course, "Best Approximation in Normed Linear Spaces," that I began giving at Penn State Uni versity more than 25 years ago. It soon became evident. that many of the students who wanted to take the course (including engineers, computer scientists, and statis ticians, as well as mathematicians) did not have the necessary prerequisites such as a working knowledge of Lp-spaces and some basic functional analysis. (Today such material is typically contained in the first-year graduate course in analysis. ) To accommodate these...