Book excerpt: The book of invited articles offers a collection of high-quality papers in selected and highly topical areas of Applied and Numerical Mathematics and Approximation Theory which have some connection to Wolfgang Dahmen's scientific work. On the occasion of his 60th birthday, leading experts have contributed survey and research papers in the areas of Nonlinear Approximation Theory, Numerical Analysis of Partial Differential and Integral Equations, Computer-Aided Geometric Design, and Learning Theory. The main focus and common theme of all the articles in this volume is the mathematics building the foundation for most efficient numerical algorithms for simulating complex phenomena.