2023 Fritz Fest: Celebrating a career in Operator Theory, Ordinary Differential Equations, Partial Differential Equations, and Quantum Theory, a conference in honor of Fritz Gesztesy's 70th birthday.

The 2023 Fritz Fest “Celebrating a Career in Operator Theory, Ordinary Differential Equations, Partial Differential Equations, and Quantum Theory” took place at Baylor University on the afternoon of November 3, 2023. It was organized by the Mathematics Department, also sponsored by the Simons Foundation, and the main goal was to celebrate the 70th birthday of Fritz Gesztesy. It brought together mathematicians of all ages, from graduate students to senior researchers. The conference was celebrated in a one-day format with two outstanding speakers and all-time Fritz’s collaborators. Both lectures, one hour each, took place in the Lewis-Birkhead Lecture Hall of the beautiful Armstrong Browning Library, a building inspired by Italian Renaissance architecture and located on the campus of Baylor University in Waco, Texas. 

Dr. Lee Nordt, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Geosciences at Baylor University, delivered the introductory remarks in the opening ceremony. He celebrated both the impressive scientific trajectory of Fritz Gesztesy and his impact on the Department of Mathematics and on the College of Arts and Sciences in general since he joined Baylor in 2016.

The first lecture on Weyl-Titchmarsh's theory for first-order  systems with distributional coefficients was delivered by Prof. Rudi Weikard from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA. It was followed by the talk on the Krein-von Neumann extension of an ordinary differential operator, delivered by Prof. Roger Nichols from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, USA. 

Fritz Gesztesy is Ralph and Jean Storm Professor of Mathematics. He has lectured and held visiting or tenured positions at numerous institutions and, so far, supervised 7 Masters and 14 Ph.D. students. Currently, he is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Spectral Theory (EMS). Among his professional honors are Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (University of Bielefeld, Germany, 1980-81 and 1983-84); Max Kade Fellowship (California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA, 1987-88); Ludwig Boltzmann Award (Austrian Physical Society) in 1987; invited speaker at the AMS Meeting in 1996; elected to the Royal Norwegian Society of Science and Letters, 2002; Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (inaugural class, 2013); and Doctor Honoris Causa by Technical University of Graz, Austria, in 2022.

The Department of Mathematics is honored to have Fritz Gesztesy among our faculty. Happy birthday, Fritz, and have a long and productive life! 

Read more on the conference webpage and poster.