Twelfth International Symposium on Orthogonal Polynomials, Special Functions and Applications

Sousse (Tunisia), March 24-29, 2013

For the 12th  International conference on Orthogonal Polynomials, Special Functions and their Applications (website) we visited Africa. The conference was at hotel El Mouradi Palace in Port El Kantaoui, near Sousse in Tunisia. The conference was dedicated to Ahmed Fitouhi at the occasion of his 65th birthday. The Scientific Committee consisted of Alexander Aptekarev, Bernhard Beckermann, Christian Berg, Charles Dunkl, Tom Koornwinder, Andrei Martínez Finkelshtein, Ahmed Fitouhi, Mourad Ismail, Erik Koelink, Francisco Marcellán, Pascal Maroni, Ed Saff and Walter Van Assche. The local organizing committee consisted of Mohamed Jalel Atia, Ahmed Fitouhi, Hedi Elmonser, Mejri Mannoubi, Lotfi Kheriji, Imed Ben-Salah, Amel Safraoui and Sami Kouki.

The plenary speakers were

  1. Lazhar Dhaouadi :  Positivity of the generalized translation associated with the q-Hankel transform and applications
  2. Jacob Stordal Christiansen (Szegő prize) : Szegő's theorem
  3. Nizar Demni : Special functions, probability and free probability
  4. Luc Vinet : Quantum wires, orthogonal polynomials and Diophantine approximation
  5. Jiang Zeng : Hankel-Pfaffians of Catalan numbers, integrals of Selberg type and orthogonal polynomials
  6. Guillermo López Lagomasino : A Markov type theorem for type I Hermite-Padé approximation of general Nikishin systems
  7. Jasper Stokman : Bilateral series solutions of reflection quantum KZ equations
  8. Antonio Durán : Exploring Krall's paradise
  9. Yuan Xu : Sobolev orthogonal polynomials of several variables

The Gabor Szegő prize was awarded for the second time to Jacob Christiansen and he gave one of the plenary talk (on Szegő's theorem). There was an excursion on Wednesday to El Djem (with a beautiful Roman amphitheater) and to the city of Kairouan.

There were 200 participants from 32 countries.The conference booklet contains all the abstracts, the program and a list of the participants. The proceedings are published in the journal Integral Transforms and Special Functions, volume 26, number 2 (2015).