This volume contains a selection of eighteen peer-reviewed articles that were presented at the 5th International Conference on Multivariate Approximation, held in Witten-Bommerholz in September 2002. The contributions cover recent developments of constructive approximation on manifolds, approximation by splines and kernels, subdivision techniques and wavelet methods. The main topics are:- applications of multivariate approximation in finance- approximation and stable reconstruction of images, data reduction- multivariate splines for Lagrange interpolation and quasi-interpolation- radial basis functions- spherical point sets- refinable function vectors and non-stationary subdivision- applications of adaptive wavelet methods- blending functions and cubature formulae- singularities of harmonic functionsThe book provides an overview of state-of-the-art developments in a highly relevant field of applied mathematics, with many links to computerscience and geophysics.