This book contains the refereed papers which were presented at the interna- tional conference on "Multivariate Approximation and Splines" held in Mannheim, Germany, on September 7-10,1996. Fifty experts from Bulgaria, England, France, Israel, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Switzerland, Ukraine, USA and Germany participated in the symposium. It was the aim of the conference to give an overview of recent developments in multivariate approximation with special emphasis on spline methods. The field is characterized by rapidly developing branches such as approximation, data fit- ting, interpolation,...

Splines play an important role in applied mathematics since they possess high flexibility to approximate efficiently, even nonsmooth functions which are given explicitly or only implicitly, e.g. by differential equations. The aim of this book is to analyse in a unified approach basic theoretical and numerical aspects of interpolation and best approximation by splines in one variable. The first part on spaces of polynomials serves as a basis for investigating the more complex structure of spline spaces. Given in the appendix are brief introductions to the theory of...