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.

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 mathematics and engineering. An introductory chapter supplies background material, including reproducing kernel Pontryagin spaces, complementary spaces in the sense of de Branges, and a key result on defining operators as closures of linear relations. The presentation is self-contained and streamlined so that the indefinite case is handled completely parallel to the definite case.

The class of Schur functions consists of analytic functions on the unit disk that are bounded by $1$. The Schur algorithm associates to any such function a sequence of complex constants, which is much more useful than the Taylor coefficients. There is a generalization to matrix-valued functions and a corresponding algorithm. These generalized Schur functions have important applications to the theory of linear operators, to signal processing and control theory, and to other areas of engineering. In this book, Alpay looks at matrix-valued Schur functions and their applications from the unifying point of view of spaces with reproducing kernels. This approach is used here to study the relationship between the modeling of time-invariant dissipative linear systems and the theory of linear operators. The inverse scattering problem plays a key role in the exposition. The point of view also allows for a natural way to tackle more general cases, such as nonstationary systems, non-positive metrics, and pairs of commuting nonself-adjoint operators. This is the English translation of a volume originally published in French by the Societe Mathematique de France. Translated by Stephen S. Wilson.

The Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications provides a state-of-the-art research venue for the broad emerging area of mathematical engineering in the context of harmonic analysis. This two-volume set consists of contributions from speakers at the February Fourier Talks (FFT) from 2006-2011. The FFT are organized by the Norbert Wiener Center in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park. These volumes span a large spectrum of harmonic analysis and its applications. They are divided into the following parts: Volume I · Sampling Theory · Remote Sensing · Mathematics of Data Processing · Applications of Data Processing Volume II · Measure Theory · Filtering · Operator Theory · Biomathematics Each part provides state-of-the-art results, with contributions from an impressive array of mathematicians, engineers, and scientists in academia, industry, and government. Excursions in Harmonic Analysis: The February Fourier Talks at the Norbert Wiener Center is an excellent reference for graduate students, researchers, and professionals in pure and applied mathematics, engineering, and physics.

This work contributes to the study of quaternionic linear operators. This study is a generalization of the complex case, but the noncommutative setting of quaternions shows several interesting new features, see e.g. the so-called S-spectrum and S-resolvent operators. In this work, we study de Branges spaces, namely the quaternionic counterparts of spaces of analytic functions (in a suitable sense) with some specific reproducing kernels, in the unit ball of quaternions or in the half space of quaternions with positive real parts. The spaces under consideration will be Hilbert or Pontryagin or Krein spaces. These spaces are closely related to operator models that are also discussed. The focus of this book is the notion of characteristic operator function of a bounded linear operator A with finite real part, and we address several questions like the study of J-contractive functions, where J is self-adjoint and unitary, and we also treat the inverse problem, namely to characterize which J-contractive functions are characteristic operator functions of an operator. In particular, we prove the counterpart of Potapov's factorization theorem in this framework. Besides other topics, we consider canonical differential equations in the setting of slice hyperholomorphic functions and we define the lossless inverse scattering problem. We also consider the inverse scattering problem associated with canonical differential equations. These equations provide a convenient unifying framework to discuss a number of questions pertaining, for example, to inverse scattering, non-linear partial differential equations and are studied in the last section of this book.

Expository articles describing the role Hardy spaces, Bergman spaces, Dirichlet spaces, and Hankel and Toeplitz operators play in modern analysis.