Generalized Schur functions are scalar- or operator-valued holomorphic functions such that certain associated kernels have a finite number of negative squares. This book develops the realization theory of such functions as characteristic functions of coisometric, isometric, and unitary colligations whose state spaces are reproducing kernel Pontryagin spaces. This provides a modern system theory setting for the relationship between invariant subspaces and factorization, operator models, Krein-Langer factorizations, and other topics. The book is intended for students and researchers in...

What is clear and easy to grasp attracts us; complications deter David Hilbert The material presented in this volume is based on discussions conducted in peri- odically held seminars by the Nonlinear Functional Analysis research group of the University of Seville. This book is mainly addressed to those working or aspiring to work in the field of measures of noncompactness and metric fixed point theory. Special em- phasis is made on the results in metric fixed point theory which were derived from geometric coefficients defined by means of measures of noncompactness and on the relationships...

About one half of the papers in this volume are based on lectures which were pre- sented at a conference at Leipzig University in August 1994, which was dedicated to Vladimir Petrovich Potapov. He would have been eighty years old. These have been supplemented by: (1) Historical material, based on reminiscences of former colleagues, students and associates of V.P. Potapov. (2) Translations of a number of important papers (which serve to clarify the Potapov approach to problems of interpolation and extension, as well as a number of related problems and methods) and are relatively unknown in the...

In this book we shall study linear functional equations of the form m bu(x) == Lak(X)U(Qk(X)) = f(x), (1) k=l where U is an unknown function from a given space F(X) of functions on a set X, Qk: X -+ X are given mappings, ak and f are given functions. Our approach is based on the investigation of the operators given by the left-hand side of equa- tion (1). In what follows such operators will be called functional operators. We will pay special attention to the spectral properties of functional operators, first of all, to invertibility and the Noether property. Since the set X, the space F(X),...

This volume is dedicated to A.C. Zaanen, one of the pioneers of functional analysis, and eminent expert in modern integration theory and the theory of vector lattices, on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The book opens with biographical notes, including Zaanen's curriculum vitae and list of publications. It contains a selection of original research papers which cover a broad spectrum of topics about operators and semigroups of operators on Banach lattices, analysis in function spaces and integration theory. Special attention is paid to the spectral theory of operators on Banach lattices; in...

This book provides an introduction to the modern theory of polynomials whose coefficients are linear bounded operators in a Banach space - operator polynomials. This theory has its roots and applications in partial differential equations, mechanics and linear systems, as well as in modern operator theory and linear algebra. Over the last decade, new advances have been made in the theory of operator polynomials based on the spectral approach. The author, along with other mathematicians, participated in this development, and many of the recent results are reflected in this monograph. It is a...

R. S. PHILLIPS I am very gratified to have been asked to give this introductory talk for our honoured guest, Israel Gohberg. I should like to begin by spending a few minutes talking shop. One of the great tragedies of being a mathematician is that your papers are read so seldom. On the average ten people will read the introduction to a paper and perhaps two of these will actually study the paper. It's difficult to know how to deal with this problem. One strategy which will at least get you one more reader, is to collaborate with someone. I think Israel early on caught on to this, and I...

In this article we shall use two special classes of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (which originate in the work of de Branges [dB) and de Branges-Rovnyak [dBRl), respectively) to solve matrix versions of a number of classical interpolation problems. Enroute we shall reinterpret de Branges' characterization of the first of these spaces, when it is finite dimensional, in terms of matrix equations of the Liapunov and Stein type and shall subsequently draw some general conclusions on rational m x m matrix valued functions which are "J unitary" a.e. on either the circle or the line. We shall...