These Proceedings form a record of the lectures presented at the interna- tional Conference on Functional Analysis and Approximation held at the Ober- wolfach Mathematical Research Institute, August 9-16, 1980. They include 33 of the 38 invited conference papers, as well as three papers subsequently submitted in writing. Further, there is a report devoted to new and unsolved problems, based on two special sessions of the conference. The present volume is the sixth Oberwolfach Conference in Birkhauser's ISNM series to be edited at Aachen *. It is once again devoted to more significant results obtained in the wide areas of approximation theory, harmonic analysis, functional analysis, and operator theory during the past three years. Many of the papers solicited not only outline fundamental advances in their fields but also focus on interconnections between the various research areas. The papers in the present volume have been grouped into nine chapters. Chapter I, on operator theory, deals with maps on positive semidefinite opera- tors, spectral bounds of semigroup operators, evolution equations of diffusion type, the spectral theory of propagators, and generalized inverses. Chapter II, on functional analysis, contains papers on modular approximation, interpolation spaces, and unconditional bases.