The Ninth International Conference on Approximation Theory was hosted by Vanderbilt University in
Nashville, January 3-6, 1998. Previous conferences in this series were held in 1973, 1976, 1980, and
1992 in Austin, and 1983, 1986, 1989, and 1995 in College Station. The conference was attended by
190 mathematicians from 21 different countries.
The program included seven invited one-hour survey talks and the one-hour presentation of this year's
Popov Prize winner, Arno Kuijlaars. In addition to a large number of contributed talks, there were eight
special sessions on interdisciplinary topics of current research interest, arranged by Yang Wang
(wavelets), Richard Varga (approximation in the complex plane), Joe Ward (radial basis functions),
Boris Shekhtman (abstract approximation), Hrushikesh Mhaskar (neural networks), Giinther
Niirnberger (splines), Hans Hagen (computer aided geometric design), and Vladymir Temlyakov
(nonlinear w-term approximation).