Let be compact and let . Since every is supported in , the function is uniformly continuous on the compact set
Given , choose so that
whenever and . Since and ,
Property 3 makes the final term smaller than for all sufficiently large , uniformly in . Hence uniformly on every compact set. The sequence is an approximate identity.
For the second part, extend to a continuous function on by setting it equal to zero outside ; continuity at the endpoints uses . Define
These nonnegative kernels have integral one. For every , their mass outside tends to zero exponentially relative to the mass near zero, so they satisfy property 3.
For , the convolution is
Because on the square , no cutoff remains in this formula. Expanding the th power shows that is a polynomial in . The first part, applied to the compact interval , gives
This proves the Weierstrass approximation theorem for functions with the stated endpoint values.
For and , translations converge to in the Lp space norm. First prove this for continuous compactly supported functions, using uniform continuity and a common bounded support. Their density in Lp space, together with the norm-preserving translation map and the triangle inequality, proves the assertion for arbitrary . It implies convergence of averages over shrinking intervals, a basic approximate identity argument. The corresponding assertion fails for general functions, such as an indicator function with a jump.