Prologue to Multiscale, Nonlinear and Adaptive Approximation II

This volume is dedicated to our dear friend and colleagueWolfgang Dahmen on the occasion of his 75th birthday. To a great extent, it is a continuation of the publication Multiscale, Nonlinear and Adaptive Approximation which was published by Springer Verlag fifteen years ago in honor of Wolfgang’s 60th birthday. As such, we found it appropriate to include (below) the introduction to that volume which provided, in some detail, the enormous contributions of Wolfgang to the subjects of Approximation Theory, Numerical Computation, and Engineering Applications.