Mathematical Functions and their Approximations is an updated version of the Applied Mathematics Series 55 Handbook based on the 1954 Conference on Mathematical Tables, held at Cambridge, Massachusetts. The aim of the conference is to determine the need for mathematical tables in view of the availability of high speed computing machinery.

This work is composed of 14 chapters that cover the machinery for the expansion of the generalized hypergeometric function and other functions in infinite series of Jacobi and Chebyshev polynomials of the first kind. Numerical coefficients for Chebyshev expansions of the more common functions are tabulated. Other chapters contain polynomial and rational approximations for certain class of G-functions, the coefficients in the early polynomials of these rational approximations, and the Padé approximations for many of the elementary functions and the incomplete gamma functions. The remaining chapters describe the development of analytic approximations and expansions.

This book will prove useful to mathematicians, advance mathematics students, and researchers.