Download or read book Spherical Harmonics and Approximations on the Unit Sphere: An Introduction written by Kendall Atkinson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-02-17 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These notes provide an introduction to the theory of spherical harmonics in an arbitrary dimension as well as an overview of classical and recent results on some aspects of the approximation of functions by spherical polynomials and numerical integration over the unit sphere. The notes are intended for graduate students in the mathematical sciences and researchers who are interested in solving problems involving partial differential and integral equations on the unit sphere, especially on the unit sphere in three-dimensional Euclidean space. Some related work for approximation on the unit disk in the plane is also briefly discussed, with results being generalizable to the unit ball in more dimensions.