Willi Freeden, Volker Michel

• This review article reports current activities and recent progress on constructive approximation and numerical analysis in physical geodesy. The paper focuses on two major topics of interest, namely trial systems for purposes of global and local approximation and methods for adequate geodetic application. A fundamental tool is an uncertainty principle, which gives appropriate bounds for the quantification of space and momentum localization of trial functions. The essential outcome is a better understanding of constructive approximation in terms of radial basis functions such as splines and wavelets.