A unique series of fascinating research papers on subjects related to the work of Niels Henrik Abel, written by some of the foremost specialists in their fields. Some of the authors have been specifically invited to present papers, discussing the influence of Abel in a mathematical-historical context. Others have submitted papers presented at the Abel Bicentennial Conference, Oslo June 3-8, 2002. The idea behind the book has been to produce a text covering a substantial part of the legacy of Abel, as perceived at the beginning of the 21st century.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Workshop on app1ications of linear operator theory to systems and networks, which was held at the Weizmann Institute of Science in the third week of June, 19S3,just be fore the MTNS Conference in Beersheva. For a 10ng time these subjects were studied indepen- dent1y by mathematica1 ana1ysts and e1ectrica1 engineers. Never- the1ess, in spite of the lack of communication, these two groups often deve10ped parallel theories, though in different languages, at different levels of genera1ity and typica11y quite different motivations. In the last severa1 years each side has become aware of the work of the other and there is a seeming1y ever- increasing invo1vement of the abstract theories of factorization, extension and interpolation of operators (and operator/matrix va1ued functions) to the design and analysis of systems and net- works. Moreover, the problems encountered in e1ectrica1 engineering have genera ted new mathematica1 problems, new approaches, and usefu1 new formu1ations. The papers contained in this volume constitute a more than representative se1ection of the presented talks and dis- cussion at the workshop, and hopefu11y will also serve to give a reasonably accurate picture of the problems which are under active study today and the techniques which are used to deal with them.

These Proceedings include 42 of the 49 invited conference papers, three papers sub mitted subsequently, and a report devoted to new and unsolved problems based on two special problem sessions and as augmented by later communications from the participants. In addition, there are four short accounts that emphasize the personality of the scholars to whom the proceedings are dedicated. Due to the large number of contributors, the length of the papers had to be restricted. This volume is again devoted to recent significant results obtained in approximation theory, harmonic analysis, functional analysis, and operator theory. The papers solicited include in addition survey articles that not only describe fundamental advances in their subfields, but many also emphasize basic interconnections between the various research areas. They tend to reflect the range of interests of the organizers and of their immediate colleagues and collaborators. The papers have been grouped according to subject matter into ten chapters. Chap ter I, on operator theory, is devoted to certain classes of operators such as contraction, hyponormal, and accretive operators, as well as to suboperators and semi groups of operators. Chapter II, on functional analysis, contains papers on function spaces, algebras, ideals, and generalized functions. Chapter III, on abstract approximation, is concerned with the comparison of approximation processes, the gliding hump method, certain inter polation spaces, and n-widths."

This book is devoted to conservative realizations of various classes of Stieltjes, inverse Stieltjes, and general Herglotz-Nevanlinna functions as impedance functions of linear systems. The main feature of the monograph is a new approach to the realization theory profoundly involving developed extension theory in triplets of rigged Hilbert spaces and unbounded operators as state-space operators of linear systems. The connections of the realization theory to systems with accretive, sectorial, and contractive state-space operators as well as to the Phillips-Kato sectorial extension problem, the Krein-von Neumann and Friedrichs extremal extensions are provided. Among other results the book contains applications to the inverse problems for linear systems with non-self-adjoint Schroedinger operators, Jacobi matrices, and to the Nevanlinna-Pick system interpolation.

Pierre Grisvard, one of the most distinguished French mathematicians, died on April 22, 1994. A Conference was held in November 1994 out of which grew the invited articles contained in this volume. All of the papers are related to functional analysis applied to partial differential equations, which was Grisvard's specialty. Indeed his knowledge of this area was extremely broad. He began his career as one of the very first students of Jacques Louis Lions, and in 1965, he presented his "State Thesis" on interpolation spaces, using in particular, spectral theory for linear operators in Banach spaces. After 1970, he became a specialist in the study of optimal regularity for par tial differential equations with boundary conditions. He studied singulari ties coming from coefficients, boundary conditions, and mainly non-smooth domains, and left a legacy of precise results which have been published in journals and books. Pierre Grisvard spent most of his career as a full professor at the University of Nice, where he started in 1967. For shorter or longer periods, he visited several foreign countries, and collaborated with some of the most famous mathematicians in his field. He was also an excellent organizer and directed a large number of Ph.D. students. Finally, this volume contains a bibliography of Grisvard's works as well as one paper which he wrote and which has not been published before."

The "extensions" of rings and modules have yet to be explored in detailin aresearch monograph. This book presents state of the art research and also stimulating new and further research. Broken into three parts, Part I beginswith basic notions, terminology, definitions and a description of the classes of rings and modules. Part II considers the transference ofconditions between a base ring or module and its extensions. And Part III utilizes the concept of a minimal essental extension with respect to a specific class (a hull).

Mathematical interdisciplinary applications appear throughout. Major applications of the ring and module theory to Functional Analysis, especially "C"*-algebras, appear in Part III, make thisbook ofinterest toAlgebra and Functional Analysis researchers. Notes and exercises at the end of every chapter, and open problems at the end of all three parts, lend this as an ideal textbook forgraduate or advanced undergradate students."

Real Analysis: Measures, Integrals and Applications is devoted to the basics of integration theory and its related topics. The main emphasis is made on the properties of the Lebesgue integral and various applications both classical and those rarely covered in literature. This book provides a detailed introduction to Lebesgue measure and integration as well as the classical results concerning integrals of multivariable functions. It examines the concept of the Hausdorff measure, the properties of the area on smooth and Lipschitz surfaces, the divergence formula, and Laplace's method for finding the asymptotic behavior of integrals. The general theory is then applied to harmonic analysis, geometry, and topology. Preliminaries are provided on probability theory, including the study of the Rademacher functions as a sequence of independent random variables. The book contains more than 600 examples and exercises. The reader who has mastered the first third of the book will be able to study other areas of mathematics that use integration, such as probability theory, statistics, functional analysis, partial probability theory, statistics, functional analysis, partial differential equations and others. Real Analysis: Measures, Integrals and Applications is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in mathematics and physics. It assumes that the reader is familiar with basic linear algebra and differential calculus of functions of several variables.

The idea of optimization runs through most parts of control theory. The simplest optimal controls are preplanned (programmed) ones. The problem of constructing optimal preplanned controls has been extensively worked out in literature (see, e. g., the Pontrjagin maximum principle giving necessary conditions of preplanned control optimality). However, the concept of op timality itself has a restrictive character: it is limited by what one means under optimality in each separate case. The internal contradictoriness of the preplanned control optimality ("the better is the enemy of the good") yields that the practical significance of optimal preplanned controls proves to be not great: such controls are usually sensitive to unregistered disturbances (includ ing the round-off errors which are inevitable when computer devices are used for forming controls), as there is the effect of disturbance accumulation in the control process which makes controls to be of little use on large time inter vals. This gap is mainly provoked by oversimplified settings of optimization problems. The outstanding result of control theory established in the end of the first half of our century is that controls in feedback form ensure the weak sensitivity of closed loop systems with respect to "small" unregistered internal and external disturbances acting in them (here we do not need to discuss performance indexes, since the considered phenomenon is of general nature). But by far not all optimal preplanned controls can be represented in a feedback form."

A four-day conference, "Functional Analysis on the Eve of the Twenty First Century," was held at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, from October 24 to 27, 1993, in honor of the eightieth birthday of Professor Israel Moiseyevich Gelfand. He was born in Krasnye Okna, near Odessa, on September 2, 1913. Israel Gelfand has played a crucial role in the development of functional analysis during the last half-century. His work and his philosophy have in fact helped to shape our understanding of the term "functional analysis" itself, as has the celebrated journal Functional Analysis and Its Applications, which he edited for many years. Functional analysis appeared at the beginning of the century in the classic papers of Hilbert on integral operators. Its crucial aspect was the geometric interpretation of families of functions as infinite-dimensional spaces, and of op erators (particularly differential and integral operators) as infinite-dimensional analogues of matrices, directly leading to the geometrization of spectral theory. This view of functional analysis as infinite-dimensional geometry organically included many facets of nineteenth-century classical analysis, such as power series, Fourier series and integrals, and other integral transforms.

Nonlinear functional analysis is an important branch of contemporary mathematics. It's related to topology, ordinary differential equations, partial differential equations, groups, dynamical systems, differential geometry, measure theory, and more. In this book, the author presents some new and interesting results on fundamental methods in nonlinear functional analysis, namely variational, topological and partial order methods, which have been used extensively to solve existence of solutions for elliptic equations, wave equations, Schroedinger equations, Hamiltonian systems etc., and are also used to study the existence of multiple solutions and properties of solutions. This book is useful for researchers and graduate students in the field of nonlinear functional analysis.

The volume contains selected papers of the Spectral Function Theory seminar, Leningrad Branch of Steklov Mathematical Institute. The papers are mostly devoted to the theory of Toeplitz and model operators. These subjects are considered here from various points of view. Several papers concern the relationships of Toeplitz operators to weighted polynomial approximation. Namely, two papers by B. Solomyak and A. Volberg intensively treat the problem of spectra! multiplicity f~r analytic Toeplitz operators (which are, in fact, multiplication operators) and my paper can serve as an introduction to the problem. This theme of multiplicities is continued in a paper by V. Vasyunin where the multiplicity of the spectrum is computed for Hilbert space contractions with finite defect indices. V. Peller's paper deals with a perturbation theory problem for Toeplitz operators. In a paper by D. Yakubovich a new similarity model for a class of Toeplitz operators is constructed. S. Treil' presents a survey of a part of spectral function theory for vector valued function (Szego-Kolmogorov extreme prob!ems for operator weights, bases of vector rational functions, estimations of Hilbert transform with respect to operator weights, the operator corona problem). As a concluding remark I dare only note that the whole collection convinces us once more without a doubt of the fruitfullness of the natural union of operator theory and complex analysis (if at all the union of these fields is at all different from their intersection).

This monograph gives a systematic account of the theory of vector-valued Laplace transforms, ranging from representation theory to Tauberian theorems. In parallel, the theory of linear Cauchy problems and semigroups of operators is developed completely in the spirit of Laplace transforms. Existence and uniqueness, regularity, approximation and above all asymptotic behaviour of solutions are studied. Diverse applications to partial differential equations are given. The book contains an introduction to the Bochner integral and several appendices on background material. It is addressed to students and researchers interested in evolution equations, Laplace and Fourier transforms, and functional analysis. The second edition contains detailed notes on the developments in the last decade. They include, for instance, a new characterization of well-posedness of abstract wave equations in Hilbert space due to M. Crouzeix. Moreover new quantitative results on asymptotic behaviour of Laplace transforms have been added. The references are updated and some errors have been corrected.

This book provides a systematic development of the Rubio de Francia theory of extrapolation, its many generalizations and its applications to one and two-weight norm inequalities. The book is based upon a new and elementary proof of the classical extrapolation theorem that fully develops the power of the Rubio de Francia iteration algorithm. This technique allows us to give a unified presentation of the theory and to give important generalizations to Banach function spaces and to two-weight inequalities. We provide many applications to the classical operators of harmonic analysis to illustrate our approach, giving new and simpler proofs of known results and proving new theorems. The book is intended for advanced graduate students and researchers in the area of weighted norm inequalities, as well as for mathematicians who want to apply extrapolation to other areas such as partial differential equations.

This monograph is a presentation of a unified approach to a certain class of semimartingale inequalities, which can be regarded as probabilistic extensions of classical estimates for conjugate harmonic functions on the unit disc. The approach, which has its roots in the seminal works of Burkholder in the 80s, enables to deduce a given inequality for semimartingales from the existence of a certain special function with some convex-type properties. Remarkably, an appropriate application of the method leads to the sharp version of the estimate under investigation, which is particularly important for applications. These include the theory of quasiregular mappings (with deep implications to the geometric function theory); the boundedness of two-dimensional Hilbert transform and a more general class of Fourier multipliers; the theory of rank-one convex and quasiconvex functions; and more. The book is divided into a few separate parts. In the introductory chapter we present motivation for the results and relate them to some classical problems in harmonic analysis. The next part contains a general description of the method, which is applied in subsequent chapters to the study of sharp estimates for discrete-time martingales; discrete-time sub- and supermartingales; continuous time processes; the square and maximal functions. Each chapter contains additional bibliographical notes included for reference.

With students of Physics chiefly in mind, we have collected the material on special functions that is most important in mathematical physics and quan tum mechanics. We have not attempted to provide the most extensive collec tion possible of information about special functions, but have set ourselves the task of finding an exposition which, based on a unified approach, ensures the possibility of applying the theory in other natural sciences, since it pro vides a simple and effective method for the independent solution of problems that arise in practice in physics, engineering and mathematics. For the American edition we have been able to improve a number of proofs; in particular, we have given a new proof of the basic theorem ( 3). This is the fundamental theorem of the book; it has now been extended to cover difference equations of hypergeometric type ( 12, 13). Several sections have been simplified and contain new material. We believe that this is the first time that the theory of classical or thogonal polynomials of a discrete variable on both uniform and nonuniform lattices has been given such a coherent presentation, together with its various applications in physics."

The theory of function spaces endowed with the topology of point wise convergence, or Cp-theory, exists at the intersection of three important areas of mathematics: topological algebra, functional analysis, and general topology. Cp-theory has an important role in the classification and unification of heterogeneous results from each of these areas of research. Through over 500 carefully selected problems and exercises, this volume provides a self-contained introduction to Cp-theory and general topology. By systematically introducing each of the major topics in Cp-theory, this volume is designed to bring a dedicated reader from basic topological principles to the frontiers of modern research. Key features include: - A unique problem-based introduction to the theory of function spaces. - Detailed solutions to each of the presented problems and exercises. - A comprehensive bibliography reflecting the state-of-the-art in modern Cp-theory. - Numerous open problems and directions for further research. This volume can be used as a textbook for courses in both Cp-theory and general topology as well as a reference guide for specialists studying Cp-theory and related topics. This book also provides numerous topics for PhD specialization as well as a large variety of material suitable for graduate research.

This text is intended for an honors calculus course or for an introduction to analysis. Involving rigorous analysis, computational dexterity, and a breadth of applications, it is ideal for undergraduate majors. This third edition includes corrections as well as some additional material. Some features of the text include: The text is completely self-contained and starts with the real number axioms; The integral is defined as the area under the graph, while the area is defined for every subset of the plane; There is a heavy emphasis on computational problems, from the high-school quadratic formula to the formula for the derivative of the zeta function at zero; There are applications from many parts of analysis, e.g., convexity, the Cantor set, continued fractions, the AGM, the theta and zeta functions, transcendental numbers, the Bessel and gamma functions, and many more; Traditionally transcendentally presented material, such as infinite products, the Bernoulli series, and the zeta functional equation, is developed over the reals; and There are 385 problems with all the solutions at the back of the text.

In a number of famous works, M. Kac showed that various methods of probability theory can be fruitfully applied to important problems of analysis. The interconnection between probability and analysis also plays a central role in the present book. However, our approach is mainly based on the application of analysis methods (the method of operator identities, integral equations theory, dual systems, integrable equations) to probability theory (Levy processes, M. Kac's problems, the principle of imperceptibility of the boundary, signal theory). The essential part of the book is dedicated to problems of statistical physics (classical and quantum cases). We consider the corresponding statistical problems (Gibbs-type formulas, non-extensive statistical mechanics, Boltzmann equation) from the game point of view (the game between energy and entropy). One chapter is dedicated to the construction of special examples instead of existence theorems (D. Larson's theorem, Ringrose's hypothesis, the Kadison-Singer and Gohberg-Krein questions). We also investigate the Bezoutiant operator. In this context, we do not make the assumption that the Bezoutiant operator is normally solvable, allowing us to investigate the special classes of the entire functions.

This book deals with nonsmooth structures arising within the optimization setting. It considers four optimization problems, namely, mathematical programs with complementarity constraints, general semi-infinite programming problems, mathematical programs with vanishing constraints and bilevel optimization. The author uses the topological approach and topological invariants of corresponding feasible sets are investigated. Moreover, the critical point theory in the sense of Morse is presented and parametric and stability issues are considered. The material progresses systematically and establishes a comprehensive theory for a rather broad class of optimization problems tailored to their particular type of nonsmoothness. Topological Aspects of Nonsmooth Optimization will benefit researchers and graduate students in applied mathematics, especially those working in optimization theory, nonsmooth analysis, algebraic topology and singularity theory.

Degenerate and singular parabolic equations have been the subject of extensive research for the last 25 years. Despite important achievements, the issue of the Harnack inequality for non-negative solutions to these equations, both of p-Laplacian and porous medium type, while raised by several authors, has remained basically open. Recently considerable progress has been made on this issue, to the point that, except for the singular sub-critical range, both for the p-laplacian and the porous medium equations, the theory is reasonably complete. It seemed therefore timely to trace a comprehensive overview, that would highlight the main issues and also the problems that still remain open. The authors give a comprehensive treatment of the Harnack inequality for non-negative solutions to p-laplace and porous medium type equations, both in the degenerate (p2 or m1) and in the singular range (1p<2 or 0m<1), starting from the notion of solution and building all the necessary technical tools. The book is self-contained. Building on a similar monograph by the first author, the authors of the present book focus entirely on the Harnack estimates and on their applications: indeed a number of known regularity results are given a new proof, based on the Harnack inequality. It is addressed to all professionals active in the field, and also to advanced graduate students, interested in understanding the main issues of this fascinating research field.