Why multilayer perceptrons?

According to the Universal approximation theorem, a feed-forward neural network with just a single hidden layer containing a finite number of neurons can approximate a continuous multidimensional function to arbitrary accuracy, assuming the activation function for the hidden layer is a non-constant, bounded and monotonically-increasing continuous function.

Note that the requirements on the activation function only applies to the hidden layer, the output nodes are always assumed to be linear, so as to not restrict the range of output values.