Operator Theory, System Theory and Related Topics: The Moshe Livšic Anniversary Volume

This volume presents the refereed proceedings of the Conference in Operator The­ ory in Honour of Moshe Livsic 80th Birthday, held June 29 to July 4, 1997, at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Beer-Sheva, Israel) and at the Weizmann In­ stitute of Science (Rehovot, Israel). The volume contains papers in operator theory and its applications (understood in a very wide sense), many of them reflecting, 1 directly or indirectly, a profound impact of the work of Moshe Livsic. Moshe (Mikhail Samuilovich) Livsic was born on July 4, 1917, in the small town of Pokotilova near Uman, in the province of Kiev in the Ukraine; his family moved to Odessa when he was four years old. In 1933 he enrolled in the Department of Physics and Mathematics at the Odessa State University, where he became a student of M. G. Krein and an active participant in Krein's seminar - one of the centres where the ideas and methods of functional analysis and operator theory were being developed. Besides M. G. Krein, M. S. Livsic was strongly influenced B. Va. Levin, an outstanding specialist in the theory of analytic functions. A by deep understanding of operator theory as well as function theory and a penetrating search of connections between the two, were to become one of the landmarks of M. S. Livsic's work. M. S. Livsic defended his Ph. D.

Table of Contents:
List of Publications of M. S. Livšic.- Vortices of 2D Systems.- Realization and Factorization in Reproducing Kernel Pontryagin Spaces.- Models of Contractions Constructed from the Defect Function of Their Characteristic Functions.- Measure Schur Complements and Spectral Functions of Unitary Operators with Respect to Different Scales.- On the Second Order Interpolation for Rational Vector Functions.- Generalized Moments, Center-focus Conditions, and Compositions of Polynomials.- Inverse Spectral Problem for the Sturm-Liouville Operator with Eigenvalue Parameter Dependent Boundary Condition.- A Module Approach to Commutant Lifting on Kre?n Spaces.- On Dual Canonical Systems and Dual Matrix String Equations.- Angle between Subspaces of Analytic and Antianalytic Functions in Weighted L2 Spaces on the Boundary of a Multiply Connected Domain.- Bitangential Interpolation for Upper Triangular Operators with Infinitely Many Interpolation Nodes.- Some Applications of Operator-valued Herglotz Functions.- Analogues of a Theorem of Frostman on Linear Fractional Transformations of Inner Functions and the Typical Spectral Structure of Analytic Families of Weak Contractions.- Right and Left Joint System Representation of a Rational Matrix Function in General Position (System Representation Theory for Dummies).- One-parameter Semigroups of Fractional-linear Transformations.- Scattering from an Impurity: Lax-Phillips Approach.- Spectral Theory of Wiener-Hopf Operators and Functional Model.- Operator Dilations with Prescribed Commutators.- Condition of Orthogonality of Spectral Matrix Function.- Functional Models of Linear Operators.- Non-self-adjoint Periodic Dirac Operators.- A Note on Hyponormal Operators Associated with Quadrature Domains.- Two Remarks on Fuchsian Groups of WidomType.- A Functional Model for the Lie Algebra SL(2, ?) of Linear Non-self-adjoint Operators.