Book excerpt: This volume is dedicated to the memory of Israel Glazman, an outstanding personality and distinguished mathematician, the author of many remarkable papers and books in operator theory and its applications. The present book opens with an essay devoted to Glazman's life and scientific achievements. It focusses on the areas of his unusually wide interests and consists of 18 mathematical papers in spectral theory of differential operators and linear operators in Hilbert and Banach spaces, analytic operator functions, ordinary and partial differential equations, functional equations, mathematical physics, nonlinear functional analysis, approximation theory and optimization, and mathematical statistics. The book gives a picture of the current state of some important problems in areas of operator theory and its applications and will be of interest to a wide group of researchers working in pure and applied mathematics.