This survey paper discusses the history of approximation formulas for n-th
order derivatives by integrals involving orthogonal polynomials. There is a
large but rather disconnected corpus of literature on such formulas. We give
some results in greater generality than in the literature. Notably we unify the
continuous and discrete case. We make many side remarks, for instance on
wavelets, Mantica's Fourier-Bessel functions and Greville's minimum R_alpha
formulas in connection with discrete smoothing.Comment: 35 pages, 3 figures; minor corrections, subsection 3.11 added;
accepted by J. Approx. Theor