International Conference on Difference Equations, Special Functions and Applications

München (Germany), July 25-30, 2005

The 8th  International conference on Orthogonal polynomials, Special Functions and their Applications (OPSFA8) was a joint conference (poster and website) with the International Society on Difference Equations (ICDEA10) and  Symmetries and Integrability of Difference Equations (SIDE6.5). It was held at the Technical University of München and it was dedicated to Bernd Aulbach, a member of the Scientific and Local Organizing Committee, who died suddenly and unexpectedly on January 14, 2005. The Scientific Committee consisted of Richard Askey, Christian Berg, Alexander Bobenko, Saber Elaydi, Basil Grammaticos, Jarmo Hietarinta, Mourad Ismail, Nalini Joshi, Gerry Ladas, Rupert Lasser, Lance Littlejohn, Vassilis Pappageorgiou, Allan Peterson, George Sell, Alexander Sharkovsky, Sergei Suslov and Pavel Winternitz. The local organization was in the hands of Peter Kloeden, Rupert Lasser, Frank Nijhoff and Andreas Ruffing.

Each day there was one plenary speaker for the full audience

  1. Barry Simon : Zeros of orthogonal polynomials
  2. Alexander Sharkovsky : Ideal turbulence and problems of its visualization
  3. Edward B. Saff : Discretizing manifolds via minimum energy points
  4. Nalini Joshi : Analytic results for (ultra-discrete) cellular automata
  5. Hal Smith : Mixed monotone difference equations
  6. Mourad Ismail : The Ramanujan continued fractions


Furthermore there were invited speakers who spoke in parallel sessions:

  • Saber Elaydi : Nonautonomous difference equations
  • Christian Berg : Logarithmic order and type of entire functions associated with indeterminate moment problems
  • Jeffrey S. Geronimo : Two variable orthogonal polynomials and factorization
  • Donato Trigiante : Pascal matrix, special polynomials and difference equations
  • Jim Cushing : Periodically forced difference equations and applications arising from population dynamics
  • Walter Van Assche : Orthogonal polynomials, recurrence relations and difference equations
  • Robert Devaney : Sierpinski curve Julia sets for complex rational maps
  • Herbert Stahl : Orthogonal polynomials, Padé approximants and sets of minimal capacity
  • Alexei Zhedanov : Explicit Padé interpolation tables and special functions
  • Erik A. van Doorn : Orthogonal polynomials and birth-death processes with killing
  • Masatoshi Noumi : Hypergeometric tau-functions for the elliptic difference Painlevé equation
  • Sergei Suslov : Basic Bernoulli and Euler polynomials and q-zeta function
  • Yaroslav Sergeyev : Infinity computer and calculus
  • Francisco Marcellán : Polynomials orthogonal with respect to a Sobolev inner product
  • Martin Bohner : Dynamic equations on time scales
  • Erik Rains : Elliptic analogues of multivariate beta integrals
  • Galliano Valent : Heun functions versus elliptic functions
  • W.N. Everitt : Fourth-order Bessel-type special functions
  • Don Lutz : Asymptotic and convergent representations for solutions of linear and nonlinear difference equations
  • Wolfram Koepf : Computer algebra methods for orthogonal polynomials
  • Walter Hayman : On the zeros of a q-Bessel function and some related functions
  • Paolo Emilio Ricci : Multi-variable Gould-Hopper and Laguerre polynomials
  • Yuri Berezansky : The complex moment problem

There were 192 participants that gave talks (conference booklet). The proceedings were published in Difference Equations, Special Functions and Orthogonal Polynomials, World Scientific, 2007 (cover).