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Let $f(x,y)=1$ if $(x,y)$ is in the unit disk and $f=0$ otherwise. I would like to approximate $f$ by a sequence of smooth functions. The functions need to be evaluated quickly so the results I'm getting from mollification are to awkward to deal with...

Thanks in advance..

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    Wait... why did you remove the specific function? o_O2010-10-26
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    Oh whoops... I was editing... that was a mistake...2010-10-26
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    That's better...2010-10-26

2 Answers 2

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You might want to try any of formulae 17 to 27 in the MathWorld page for the unit step function, since the function you're interested in is expressible as

$$1-H(x^2+y^2-1)$$

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You can convolve your function with a bivariate Gaussian density kernel, $\Phi(x,y; \sigma_x, \sigma_y)$, and obtain a smooth representation. Then you can let the variance parameters $\sigma_x$ and $\sigma_y$ go to zero to obtain arbitrarily accurate approximation to $f(x,y)$.