This monograph records progress in approximation theory and harmonic analysis on balls and spheres, and presents contemporary material that will be useful to analysts in this area. While the first part of the book contains mainstream material on the subject, the second and the third parts deal with more specialized topics, such as analysis in weight spaces with reflection invariant weight functions, and analysis on balls and simplexes. The last part of the book features several applications, including cubature formulas, distribution of points on the sphere, and the reconstruction algorithm in computerized tomography. This book is directed at researchers and advanced graduate students in analysis. Mathematicians who are familiar with Fourier analysis and harmonic analysis will understand many of the concepts that appear in this manuscript: spherical harmonics, the Hardy-Littlewood maximal function, the Marcinkiewicz multiplier theorem, the Riesz transform, and doubling weights are all familiar tools to researchers in this area.

These notes provide an introduction to the theory of spherical harmonics in an arbitrary dimension as well as an overview of classical and recent results on some aspects of the approximation of functions by spherical polynomials and numerical integration over the unit sphere. The notes are intended for graduate students in the mathematical sciences and researchers who are interested in solving problems involving partial differential and integral equations on the unit sphere, especially on the unit sphere in three-dimensional Euclidean space. Some related work for approximation on the unit disk in the plane is also briefly discussed, with results being generalizable to the unit ball in more dimensions.

Different facets of interplay between harmonic analysis and approximation theory are covered in this volume. The topics included are Fourier analysis, function spaces, optimization theory, partial differential equations, and their links to modern developments in the approximation theory. The articles of this collection were originated from two events. The first event took place during the 9th ISAAC Congress in Krakow, Poland, 5th-9th August 2013, at the section “Approximation Theory and Fourier Analysis”. The second event was the conference on Fourier Analysis and Approximation Theory in the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (CRM), Barcelona, during 4th-8th November 2013, organized by the editors of this volume. All articles selected to be part of this collection were carefully reviewed.

​This book provides an introduction to h-harmonics and Dunkl transforms. These are extensions of the ordinary spherical harmonics and Fourier transforms, in which the usual Lebesgue measure is replaced by a reflection-invariant weighted measure. The authors’ focus is on the analysis side of both h-harmonics and Dunkl transforms. Graduate students and researchers working in approximation theory, harmonic analysis, and functional analysis will benefit from this book.

These Proceedings form a record of the lectures presented at the interna tional Conference on Functional Analysis and Approximation held at the Ober wolfach Mathematical Research Institute, August 9-16, 1980. They include 33 of the 38 invited conference papers, as well as three papers subsequently submitted in writing. Further, there is a report devoted to new and unsolved problems, based on two special sessions of the conference. The present volume is the sixth Oberwolfach Conference in Birkhauser's ISNM series to be edited at Aachen *. It is once again devoted to more significant results obtained in the wide areas of approximation theory, harmonic analysis, functional analysis, and operator theory during the past three years. Many of the papers solicited not only outline fundamental advances in their fields but also focus on interconnections between the various research areas. The papers in the present volume have been grouped into nine chapters. Chapter I, on operator theory, deals with maps on positive semidefinite opera tors, spectral bounds of semigroup operators, evolution equations of diffusion type, the spectral theory of propagators, and generalized inverses. Chapter II, on functional analysis, contains papers on modular approximation, interpolation spaces, and unconditional bases.

This book demonstrates how harmonic analysis can provide penetrating insights into deep aspects of modern analysis. It is both an introduction to the subject as a whole and an overview of those branches of harmonic analysis that are relevant to the Kakeya conjecture. The usual background material is covered in the first few chapters: the Fourier transform, convolution, the inversion theorem, the uncertainty principle and the method of stationary phase. However, the choice of topics is highly selective, with emphasis on those frequently used in research inspired by the problems discussed in the later chapters. These include questions related to the restriction conjecture and the Kakeya conjecture, distance sets, and Fourier transforms of singular measures. These problems are diverse, but often interconnected; they all combine sophisticated Fourier analysis with intriguing links to other areas of mathematics and they continue to stimulate first-rate work. The book focuses on laying out a solid foundation for further reading and research. Technicalities are kept to a minimum, and simpler but more basic methods are often favored over the most recent methods. The clear style of the exposition and the quick progression from fundamentals to advanced topics ensures that both graduate students and research mathematicians will benefit from the book.