This volume is dedicated to the memory of Issai Schur. It opens with some
biographical reminiscences of the famous school he established in Berlin, his
brutal dismissal by the Nazi regime and his tragic end in Palestine. This is
followed by an extensive review of the extraordinary impact of his lesser known
analytic work. Finally, leading mathematicians in the representation theory of
the symmetric groups, of semisimple and affine Lie algebras and of Chevalley
groups have contributed original and outstanding articles. These concern many
areas inspired by Schur's work as well as more recent developments involving
crystal and canonical bases, Hecke algebras, and the geometric approach linking
orbits