Book excerpt: Recent years have witnessed a growth of interest in the special functions called ridge functions. These functions appear in various fields and under various guises. They appear in partial differential equations (where they are called plane waves), in computerized tomography, and in statistics. Ridge functions are also the underpinnings of many central models in neural network theory. In this book various approximation theoretic properties of ridge functions are described. This book also describes properties of generalized ridge functions, and their relation to linear superpositions and Kolmogorov's famous superposition theorem. In the final part of the book, a single and two hidden layer neural networks are discussed. The results obtained in this part are based on properties of ordinary and generalized ridge functions. Novel aspects of the universal approximation property of feedforward neural networks are revealed. This book will be of interest to advanced graduate students and researchers working in functional analysis, approximation theory, and the theory of real functions, and will be of particular interest to those wishing to learn more about neural network theory and applications and other areas where ridge functions are used.