Many problems in operator theory lead to the consideration ofoperator equa- tions, either directly or via some reformulation. More often than not, how- ever, the underlying space is too 'small' to contain solutions of these equa- tions and thus it has to be 'enlarged' in some way. The Berberian-Quigley enlargement of a Banach space, which allows one to convert approximate into genuine eigenvectors, serves as a classical example. In the theory of operator algebras, a C*-algebra A that turns out to be small in this sense tradition- ally is enlarged to its (universal) enveloping von Neumann...

The aim of this first international conference entirely devoted to the theory of elementary operators and their interrelations with and applications to other fields was both to give a comprehensive overview of the development of the theory of elementary operators since its beginnings at the end of the last century as well as to discuss some of the recent research done in this area. The volume also includes applications to algebraic properties of linear mappings (on rings as well as on Banach algebras), or to mathematical physics, and connections to related fields such as multiparameter...