This book developed out of a set of lecture notes which I began
preparing in the fall of 1970 for a course on spline functions at the
University of Texas at Austin. The material, which I have been reworking
ever since~ was expanded and revised several times for later courses at the
Mathematics Research Center in Madison, the University of Munich, the
University of Texas, and the Free University of Berlin. It was my original
intent to cover both the theory and applications of spline functions in a
single monograph, but the amount of interesting and useful material is so
large that I found it impossible to give all of it a complete and comprehensive
treatment in one volume.
1