Opening Address

Abstract

Dear Colleagues and Dear Friends Ladies and Gentlemen I am thankful for this opportunity to open the conference on the occasion of the sixtieth birthday of M.A. Kaashoek, the founder and head of the Analysis and Operator Theory group in Amsterdam at the Vrije Universiteit. He and his group have made important contributions to traditional operator theory as well as developing new areas. I was closely related to this group and helped to build and nurture it. Together we established and developed connections between operator theory, integral equations and systems theory. Those connections allowed us to enrich considerably all theories involved and to build a method, based on state space techniques, for solving explicitly problems in Analysis.