This is a textbook on classical polynomial and rational approximation theory for the twenty-first century. It is aimed at advanced undergraduates and graduate students across all of applied mathematics.
The following are the distinctive features of the book:
- The emphasis is on topics close to numerical algorithms.
- Everything is illustrated with Chebfun.
- Each chapter is a publishable Matlab M-file, available online.
- There is bias towards theorems and methods for analytic functions, which appear so often in applications, rather than on functions at the edge of discontinuity with their seductive theoretical challenges.
- Original sources are cited rather than textbooks, and each item in the bibliography is accompanied by an editorial comment.
Keywords: approximation theory, numerical analysis, quadrature, spectral methods