Characterization of an extremal sum of ridge functions

The approximation problem considered in the paper is to approximate a continuous multivariate function f(x)=f(_x1,…,_xd)$f(\mathbf{x})=f(x_1,\dots ,x_d)$ by sums of two ridge functions in the uniform norm. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for a sum of two ridge functions to be a best approximation to f(x)$f(\mathbf{x})$. This main result is next used in a special case to obtain an explicit formula for the approximation error and to construct one best approximation. The problem of well approximation by such sums is also considered.