The present book is the first of the two volume Proceedings of the Mark Krein International Conference on Operator Theory and Applications. This conference, which was dedicated to the 90th Anniversary of the prominent mathematician Mark Krein, was held in Odessa, Ukraine from 18-22 August, 1997. The confer­ encefocused onthemain ideas, methods, results, andachievementsofM.G. Krein. This first volume is devoted to the theory of differential operators and related topics. It opens with a description of the conference, biographical material and a number of survey papers about the work of M.G. Krein. The main part of the book consists oforiginal research papers presenting the stateofthe art in the area ofdifferential operators. The second volume of these proceedings, entitled Operator Theory and related Topics, concerns the other aspects of the conference. The two volumes will be of interest to a wide-range of readership in pure and applied mathematics, physics and engineering sciences. Table of Contents Preface............................................................. v Table of Contents VII Picture of M.G. Krein Xl About the Mark Krein International Conference . Mark Grigorevich Krein (A short biography) 5 I. Gohberg The Seminar on Ship Hydrodynamics, Organized by M.G. Krein 9 v.G. Sizov Review Papers: The Works ofM.G. Krein on Eigenfunction Expansion for Selfadjoint Operators and their Applications and Development 21 Yu.M. Berezansky M.G. Krein and the Extension Theory of Symmetric Operators.