This book is the proceeding of the International Workshop on Operator Theory and Applications (IWOTA) held in July 2018 in Shanghai, China. It consists of original papers, surveys and expository articles in the broad areas of operator theory, operator algebras and noncommutative topology. Its goal is to give graduate students and researchers a relatively comprehensive overview of the current status of research in the relevant fields. The book is also a special volume dedicated to the memory of Ronald G. Douglas who passed away on February 27, 2018 at the age of 79. Many of the contributors are Douglas' students and past collaborators. Their articles attest and commemorate his life-long contribution and influence to these fields.

This book is the proceeding of the International Workshop on Operator Theory and Applications (IWOTA) held in July 2018 in Shanghai, China. It consists of original papers, surveys and expository articles in the broad areas of operator theory, operator algebras and noncommutative topology. Its goal is to give graduate students and researchers a relatively comprehensive overview of the current status of research in the relevant fields. The book is also a special volume dedicated to the memory of Ronald G. Douglas who passed away on February 27, 2018 at the age of 79. Many of the contributors are Douglas' students and past collaborators. Their articles attest and commemorate his life-long contribution and influence to these fields.

This book examines some recent developments in the theory of $C^*$-algebras, which are algebras of operators on Hilbert spaces. An elementary introduction to the technical part of the theory is given via a basic homotopy lemma concerning a pair of almost commuting unitaries. The book presents an outline of the background as well as some recent results of the classification of simple amenable $C^*$-algebra, otherwise known as the Elliott program. This includes some stable uniqueness theorems and a revisiting of Bott maps via stable homotopy. Furthermore, $KK$-theory related rotation maps are introduced. The book is based on lecture notes from the CBMS lecture sequence at the University of Wyoming in the summer of 2015.