14th International Symposium on Orthogonal Polynomials, Special Functions and Applications

University of Kent, Canterbury (UK), JuLY 3-7, 2017

The 14th International Symposium on Orthogonal Polynomials, Special Functions and Applications (OPSFA14), organised by the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, took place 3-7 July 2017. The conference is the 14th event in the OPSFA series and the first one to take place in the UK (poster of the meeting). There were 156 participants (group picture). The website of the conference (if it is still active) contains detailed information.

The Scientific committee consisted of: Alexander Aptekarev, Peter Clarkson, Bernd Beckermann, Diego Dominici, Jeff Geronimo, Kerstin Jordaan, Nalini Joshi, Erik Koelink, Ana Loureiro, Dan Lozier, Andrei Martínez-Finkelshtein, Adri Olde Daalhuis, Betarice Pelloni, and Walter Van Assche. The local organising committee consisted of Claire Carter, Peter Clarkson (chair), Alfredo Deaño, Peter Hydon, Ana Loureiro, Elizabeth Mansfield, John Perason, and Ian Wood.

The plenary speakers (picture with the local organizers) were

  1. Arieh Iserles (University of Cambridge, UK): From Fourier’s sombrero to Chebyshev’s almond: approximation on the real line
  2. Margit Rösler (University of Paderborn, Germany): Integral representations for multivariable Bessel functions and beta distributions
  3. David Gómez-Ullate (ICMAT and Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain): Exceptional orthogonal polynomials
  4. Peter Miller (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA): Rational solutions of Painlevé equations
  5. Nina Snaith (University of Bristol, UK): Every moment brings a treasure: random matrix theory and moments of the Riemann zeta function
  6. Marta Mazzocco (Loughborough University, UK): Painlevé equations, q-Askey scheme and colliding holes on Riemann surfaces
  7. Jonathan Breuer (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel): To infinity and back (a bit)
  8. Jacek Szmigielski (University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada): Non-smooth waves and Lax integrability; the playground of approximation theory and the theory of distributions
  9. Alexander Its (Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, USA): Monodromy dependence and connection formulae for isomonodromic tau functions
  10. Evelyne Hubert (INRIA Méditerranée, Sophia Antipolis, France): Computing symmetric cubatures: A moment matrix approach
  11. Gabor Szegő lecture: Tom Trogdon (University of California, Irvine, USA): The high oscillation of special functions
  12. Arno Kuijlaars (University of Leuven, Belgium): Universality for conditional measures of the sine point process
  13. Sylvie Corteel (CNRS et Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France): Koornwinder polynomials at q = t

There was also a public lecture by Andrei Martínez-Finkelshtein (Universidad de Almería, Spain): Math is in the eye of the beholder 

The Gabor Szegő prize was awarded for the fourth time to Tom Trogdon and he gave one of the plenary talks. 

The information booklet and the timetable were available online and the abstracts can be found in the abstract booklet. The proceedings are published as a special issue in SIGMA (Symmetry, Integrability and Geometry: Methods and Applications). Some of the plenary talks are published in a special issue of Studies in Applied Mathematics, volume 141, number 4 (2018) (table of contents).