R. S. PHILLIPS I am very gratified to have been asked to give this introductory talk for our honoured guest, Israel Gohberg. I should like to begin by spending a few minutes talking shop. One of the great tragedies of being a mathematician is that your papers are read so seldom. On the average ten people will read the introduction to a paper and perhaps two of these will actually study the paper. It's difficult to know how to deal with this problem. One strategy which will at least get you one more reader, is to collaborate with someone. I think Israel early on caught on to this, and I imagine that by this time most of the analysts in the world have collaborated with him. He continues relentlessly in this pursuit; he visits his neighbour Harry Dym at the Weizmann Institute regularly, he spends several months a year in Amsterdam working with Rien Kaashoek, several weeks in Maryland with Seymour Goldberg, a couple of weeks here in Calgary with Peter Lancaster, and on the rare occasions when he is in Tel Aviv, he takes care of his many students.

Table of contents of Volume I.- A: The Calgary Conference, honoring Israel Gohberg.- Portrait I. Gohberg.- Acknowledgements.- The Calgary Conference Program.- Conference picture.- Speech of R.S. Phillips, introducing Israel Gohberg.- Mathematical tales.- Gohberg Miscellanea.- Curriculum Vitae.- List of Publications.- B: Papers on Matrix Theory and its Applications.- Some matrix inequalities in multiport network connections.- Complementary triangular forms of upper triangular Toeplitz matrices.- Comparing a matrix to its off-diagonal part.- Ranks of completions of partial matrices.- Finite dimension problems in operator theory.- Matrices with displacement structure, generalized Bézoutians, and Moebius transformations.- Generalized Gohberg-Semencul formulas for matrix inversion.- Variational properties and Rayleigh quotient algorithms for symmetric matrix pencils.- The matrix quadratic equation and factorization of matrix polynomials.- Inversion of partially specified positive definite matrices by inverse scattering.- Fast and efficient parallel inversion of Toeplitz and block Toeplitz matrices.- Stability of invariant lagrangian subspaces II.- On strong ?-stability of invariant subspaces of matrices.- On classification of invariant subspaces of a linear operator.- On the inverse of block tridiagonal matrices with applications to the inverses of band matrices and block band matrices.- Divisibility relations satisfied by the invariant factors of a matrix product.- Table of contents of Volume II.