This book contains the refereed papers which were presented at the international conference on multivariate approximation and splines held in Mannheim, Germany, on September 7-10, 1996. Fifty experts from Bulgaria, England, France, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Switzerland, Ukraine, the USA and Germany participated in the symposium. The manuscripts cover a variety of topics from the rapidly developing field of multivariate approximation, including interpolation, data fitting, splines, radial basis functions, neural networks, computer-aided design, wavelets, subdivision, optimization, differential equations and numerical integration. The research has applications in areas such as industrial production, visualization, image and signal processing, cognitive systems and modeling in medicine and natural sciences.