Fritz Gesztesy (editor) - From Operator Theory to Orthogonal Polynomials, Combinatorics, and Number Theory: A Volume in Honor of Lance Littlejohns 70th Birthday

Associate Editors:

Vadim Adamyan (Odessa, Ukraine)

Wolfgang Arendt (Ulm, Germany)

B. Malcolm Brown (Cardiff, UK)

Raul Curto (Iowa, IA, USA)

Kenneth R. Davidson (Waterloo, ON, Canada)

Fritz Gesztesy (Waco, TX, USA)

Pavel Kurasov (Stockholm, Sweden)

Vern Paulsen (Houston, TX, USA)

Mihai Putinar (Santa Barbara, CA, USA)

Ilya Spitkovsky (Abu Dhabi, UAE)

Honorary and Advisory Editorial Board:

Lewis A. Coburn (Buffalo, NY, USA)

J.William Helton (San Diego, CA, USA)

Marinus A. Kaashoek (Amsterdam, NL)

Thomas Kailath (Stanford, CA, USA)

Peter Lancaster (Calgary, Canada)

Peter D. Lax (New York, NY, USA)

Bernd Silbermann (Chemnitz, Germany)

Subseries

Linear Operators and Linear Systems

Subseries editors:

Daniel Alpay (Orange, CA, USA)

Birgit Jacob (Wuppertal, Germany)

Andr C.M. Ran (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

Subseries

Advances in Partial Differential Equations

Subseries editors:

Bert-Wolfgang Schulze (Potsdam, Germany)

Jerome A. Goldstein (Memphis, TN, USA)

Nobuyuki Tose (Yokohama, Japan)

Ingo Witt (Gttingen, Germany)

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/4850

This book is published under the imprint Birkhuser, www.birkhauser-science.com by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.This book is published under the imprint Birkhuser, www.birkhauser-science.com by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Lance L. Littlejohn

Lance Littlejohn was born on November 14, 1951, to Disney and June Littlejohn in St. Thomas, Ontario. He grew up with three siblings, Ken (who passed away in 2009), Charles, and Karen (who passed away in 2018).

Growing up, Lance was an avid baseball player. His early dream, like many kids, was to play professional baseball. He was scouted by Reno Bertoia, a former Detroit Tigers player, who invited Lance to a professional tryout. Much to Lances chagrin, Renos recommendation to him after the tryout was to attend college and forget baseball! Still, Lance has very fond memories of his baseball-playing days and has maintained life-long friendships with several former teammates. He played on several championship teams in St. Thomas and London, including the London Majors baseball team that won the Intercounty Baseball League in 1975 and, subsequently, was inducted into the London Sports Hall of Fame in 2015. Seriously, how many mathematicians can boast of that?

After his mother passed away, Lance was in doubt about whether to attend college and he credits his older brother, Charles, for convincing him to start at The University of Western Ontario (now Western University) in 1970. Lance began as a physical education major but quickly realized that he cherished intellectual challenges and hence switched his major to studying mathematics at Western and, in his senior year, won the Annie R. Kingston Gold Medal in Mathematics. It was at Western that Lance first met Jon and Peter Borwein, sons of David Borwein who was head of the mathematics department at Western. Both Jon and Peter were life-long friends of Lance before their passings in 2016 and 2020, respectively. While an undergraduate student at Western, Lance first met Wolfgang Gawronski, a postdoc working with David Borwein. Thirty years later, Wolfgang and Lance began their on-going collaboration, later joined by George Andrews, of studying combinatorial properties of some newly discovered sequences of integers.

After graduating with his masters degree in mathematics at Western in 1976, Lance began his Ph.D. studies at Penn State under the supervision of the late Allan M. Krall. Allans father, Harry Laverne Krall, was a well-known expert in orthogonal polynomials in the 1930s1940s. Laverne had suggested to Allan that Lance work on studying a generalization of the Legendre polynomials, orthogonal on [1, 1] with respect to the Lebesgue measure on (1, 1), but with unequal jumps at the endpoints 1, which he thought would be eigenfunctions of a minimal sixth-order differential equation. These polynomials [42] are known as the Krall polynomials, named after H. L. Krall; together, Allan and Lance published 13 joint papers before Allans untimely death in 2008.