An overview on meshfree approximation schemes that I recently posted can be found here. Following Zhigang's note indicating the limited accessibility of blogspot.com, a local version of the article is also provided. I am also attaching a PDF version of the html file. The conversion was done using PDF Online. An article that provides more details is also available online (journal link). JAVA applets for plotting basis functions can also be accessed [1D] [2D] [3D].