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 functions The 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.