The Operator Theory conferences, organized by the Department of Mathematics of INCREST and the University of Timi~oara, are conceived as a means to promote cooperation and exchange of information between specialists in all areas of operator theory. This volume consists of a careful selec£ion of papers contributed by the participants of the 1986 Conference. They reflect most of the topics dealt with by the modern operator theory, including recent advances in dual operator algebras and the fnvariant subspace problem, operators in indefinite metric spaces, hyponormal, quasi triangular and decomposable operators, various problems in C*- and W*-algebras and so on. The research contracts of the Department of Mathematics of INCREST with the National Council for Science and Technology of Romania provided the means for developing the research activity in mathematics; they represent the generous framework of these meetings, too. It is our pleasure to acknowledge the financial support of UNESCO which also contributed to the success of this meeting. We are indebted to Professor Israel Gohberg for including these Proceedings in the OT Series and for valuable advice in the editing process. Birkhiiuser Verlag was very cooperative in publishing this volume. Camelia Minculescu, Iren Nemethi and Rodica Stoenescu dealt with the dif ficult task of typing the whOle manuscript using a Rank Xerox 860 word processor; we thank them for the excellent job they did.
