Uniform and tangential harmonic approximation (Q2758403)

These notes, of a short course of lectures, provide an accessible introduction to the analytic (rather than potential theoretic) aspects of approximation by harmonic functions in Euclidean space. The article begins with an account of harmonic polynomials, the harmonic analogue of Laurent's theorem, and the technique of pole-pushing. This material is then used to derive the classical result that, if \(K\) is a compact subset of an open set \(\Omega\subseteq \mathbb{R}^n\) and every bounded component of \(\mathbb{R}^n\setminus K\) intersects \(\mathbb{R}^n\setminus \Omega\), then every function that is harmonic on a neighbourhood of \(K\) can be uniformly approximated on \(K\) by functions harmonic on \(\Omega\). More recent results, involving approximation on relatively closed (but not necessarily compact) subsets \(E\) of \(\Omega\), are then carefully expounded. These depend on so-called ``fusion lemmas'' based on \(C^\infty\) arguments. There is extensive material here, covering not only uniform approximation, but also tangential approximation in which the error of approximation on \(E\) tends to 0 at the boundary of \(\Omega\) (or at infinity) at some suitable predefined rate. NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEThe author concludes with several attractive applications. For example, he constructs harmonic functions on \(\mathbb{R}^n\) that decay rapidly to zero on every algebraic curve going to infinity and have zero integral on every \((n-1)\)-dimensional hyperplane. The subject is further developed by the reviewer in a subsequent article in these same proceedings [ibid. 37, 191-219 (2001; Zbl 0991.31007).NEWLINENEWLINEFor the entire collection see [Zbl 0972.00045].