Book excerpt: This book contains a selection of carefully refereed research papers, most of which were presented at the fourteenth International Workshop on Operator Theory and its Applications (IWOTA), held at Cagliari, Italy, from June 24-27, 2003. The papers, many of which have been written by leading experts in the field, concern a wide variety of topics in modern operator theory and applications, with emphasis on differential operators and numerical methods. The book will be of interest to a wide audience of pure and applied mathematicians and engineers.