Recent Developments In Harmonic Approximation,With Applications

A theorem of J.L. Walsh (1929) says that if E is a compact subset of Rⁿ with connected complement and if u is harmonic on a neighbourhood of E, then u can be uniformly approximated on E by functions harmonic on the whole of Rⁿ. In Part I of this article we survey some generalizations of Walsh’s theorem from the period 1980–94. In Part II we discuss applications of Walsh’s theorem and its generalizations to four diverse topics: universal harmonic functions, the Radon transform, the maximum principle, and the Dirichlet problem.