Book excerpt: This volume consists of 24 refereed carefully edited papers on various topics in multivariate approximation. It represents the proceedings of a workshop organized by the University of Firenze, and held in September 1995 in Montecatini, Italy.The main themes of the volume are multiresolution analysis and wavelets, multidimensional interpolation and smoothing, and computer-aided geometric design. A number of particular topics are included, like subdivision algorithms, constrained approximation and shape-preserving algorithms, thin plate splines, radial basis functions, treatment of scattered data, rational surfaces and offsets, blossoming, grid generation, surface reconstruction, algebraic curves and surfaces, and neural networks.