Professor Alexander Pushnitski's Inaugural Lecture - Spectral theory: eigenvalues of large structured matrices

The lecture will give a quick overview of spectral theory in general and focus on one particular topic: Szegő’s theorem, which has played a key role in the development of spectral theory in the 20th century. One can view Szegő’s theorem as an answer to the following question: “How does the spectrum of an infinite matrix (with a certain structure) emerge from the spectra of its truncations?”

Professor Pushnitski's lecture will attempt to demonstrate the interplay between different areas of mathematics in this circle of questions: spectral theory, mathematical physics, complex analysis and number theory.

A reception will follow the lecture. 

Biography

Alexander Pushnitski has a PhD in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics from St. Petersburg State University (1998). He came to the UK in 1999 to take up a postdoctoral research position at Sussex University. Between 1999 - 2005 he worked as a lecturer at Loughborough University, and in 2005 he moved to King's.

Alexander’s research interests cover several areas of Spectral Theory (differential operators, mathematical physics, scattering theory). In the last 5 years, his research focus has been on spectral theory of operators acting on spaces of analytic functions (Hankel and Toeplitz operators).

Alexander has held visiting research positions in Germany, France, Sweden, USA, Canada, Japan and Chile and published over 60 research papers. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Spectral Theory. In 2011 he was awarded the Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society.