For a given Beurling–Carleson subset E of the unit circle $\mathbb {T}$ which has positive Lebesgue measure, we give explicit formulas for measurable functions supported on E such that their Cauchy transforms have smooth extensions from $\mathbb {D}$ to $\mathbb {T}$. The existence of such functions has been previously established by Khrushchev in 1978, in non-constructive ways by the use of duality arguments. We construct several families of such smooth Cauchy transforms and apply them in a few related problems in analysis: an irreducibility problem for the shift operator, an inner factor permanence problem. Our development leads to a self-contained duality proof of the density of smooth functions in a very large class of de Branges–Rovnyak spaces. This extends the previously known approximation results.

For functions in $C^k(\mathbb {R})$ which commute with a translation, we prove a theorem on approximation by entire functions which commute with the same translation, with a requirement that the values of the entire function and its derivatives on a specified countable set belong to specified dense sets. Using this theorem, we show that if A and B are countable dense subsets of the unit circle $T\subseteq \mathbb {C}$ with $1\notin A$ , $1\notin B$ , then there is an analytic function $h\colon \mathbb {C}\setminus \{0\}\to \mathbb {C}$ that restricts to an order isomorphism of the arc $T\setminus \{1\}$ onto itself and satisfies $h(A)=B$ and $h'(z)\not =0$ when $z\in T$ . This answers a question of P. M. Gauthier.

For the approximation in Lp-norm, we determine the weakly asymptotic orders for the simultaneous approximation errors of Sobolev classes by piecewise cubic Hermite interpolation with equidistant knots. For p = 1, ∞, we obtain its values. By these results we know that for the Sobolev classes, the approximation errors by piecewise cubic Hermite interpolation are weakly equivalent to the corresponding infinite-dimensional Kolmogorov widths. At the same time, the approximation errors of derivatives are weakly equivalent to the corresponding infinite-dimensional Kolmogorov widths.

For weighted approximation in Lp-norm, we determine strongly asymptotic orders for the average errors of both function approximation and derivative approximation by the Bernstein operators sequence on the r-fold integrated Wiener space.

Suppose that f, g € L∞ [0,1 ] have discontinuities of the first kind only. Using the measure, max{ ∥f — h∥p, ∥g — h∥p}, of simultaneous Lp approximation, we show that the best simultaneous approximations f and g by nondecreasing functions converge uniformly as p → ∞. Part of the proof involves a discussion of discrete simultaneous approximation in a general context. Assuming only that f and g are approximately continuous, we show that their simultaneous best monotone Lp approximation is continuous.