This volume is dedicated to Bernd Silbermann on the oc- casion of his sixtieth birthday. It consists of selected papers devoted to the inexhaustible and ever-young fields of Toeplitz matrices and singular integral equations, and thus to areas Bernd Silbermann has been enriching by fundamental con- tributions for the last three decades. Most authors of this volume participated in the conference organized and sponsored by the Department of Mathematics (under the deans Dieter Happel and Jiirgen vom Scheidt) of the Chemnitz University of Technology in honor of Bernd Silbermann in Pobershau, April 8-12, 2001. The majority of the papers presented here are based on the talks given on that conference. We thank all contributors for their enthusiasm when preparing the articles for this volume. BERND SILBERMANN Operator Theory: Advances and Applications, Vol. 135, 1-12 © 2002 Birkhiiuser Verlag Basel/Switzerland Essay on Bernd Silbermann Albrecht Bottcher Bernd Silbermann was born on 6 April 1941 in Langhennersdorf, a village in Sax- ony. His parents were farmers. To this day, he is proud of his ability to drive a tractor. He went to school in Langhennersdorffrom 1947 to 1955, and in the sub- sequent two years he apprenticed to a grocer (and really sold fish). From 1958 to 1962 he attended a school in Chemnitz, and from 1962 to 1967, in the heyday of Soviet mathematics, he was a student of mathematics at the Lomonosov University in Moscow. His lecturers included such eminent mathematicians as P. S.