This book, dedicated to Mizan Rahman, is made up of a collection of articles on various aspects of q-series and special functions. Also, it includes an article by Askey, Ismail, and Koelink on Rahman's mathematical contributions and how they influenced the recent upsurge in the subject.

Audience

This book is intended for researchers and graduate students in special functions, algebraic combinatorics, quantum groups, and integrable systems.

Zusammenfassung
This volume, "Theory and Applications of Special Functions," is d- icated to Mizan Rahman in honoring him for the many important c- tributions to the theory of special functions that he has made over the years, and still continues to make. Some of the papers were presented at a special session of the American Mathematical Society Annual Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, in January 2003 organized by Mourad Ismail. Mizan Rahman's contributions are not only contained in his own - pers, but also indirectly in other papers for which he supplied useful and often essential information. We refer to the paper on his mathematics in this volume for more information. This paper contains some personal recollections and tries to describe Mizan Rahman's literary writings in his mother tongue, Bengali. An even more personal paper on Mizan Rahman is the letter by his sons, whom we thank for allowing us to reproduce it in this book. The theory of special functions is very much an application driven field of mathematics. This is a very old field, dating back to the 18th century when physicists and mathematician were looking for solutions of the fundamental differential equations of mathematical physics. Since then the field has grown enormously, and this book reflects only part of the known applications.

Inhalt
Mizan Rahman, His Mathematics and Literary Writings.- On the Completeness of Sets of q-Bessel Functions J?(3)(x; q).- a-Gaussian Polynomials and Finite Rogers-Ramanujan Identities.- On a Generalized Gamma Convolution Related to the q-Calculus.- Ramanujan and Cranks.- The Saalschütz Chain Reactions and Multiple q-Series Transformations.- Painlevé Equations and Associated Polynomials.- Zeta Functions of Heisenberg Graphs over Finite Rings.- q-Analogues of Some Multivariable Biorthogonal Polynomials.- Some Systems of Multivariable Orthogonal Askey-Wilson Polynomials.- Continuous Hahn Functions as Clebsch-Gordan Coefficients.- New Proofs of Some q-Series Results.- The Little q-Jacobi Functions of Complex Order.- A Second Addition Formula for Continuous q-Ultraspherical Polynomials.- A Bilateral Series Involving Basic Hypergeometric Functions.- The Hilbert Space Asymptotics of a Class of Orthonormal Polynomials on a Bounded Interval.- Abel-Rothe Type Generalizations of Jacobi's Triple Product Identity.- Summable Sums of Hypergeometric Series.- Askey-Wilson Functions and Quantum Groups.- An Analog of the Cauchy-Hadamard Formula for Expansions in q-Polynomials.- Strong Nonnegative Linearization of Orthogonal Polynomials.- Remarks on Some Basic Hypergeometric Series.