The origins of the Prague seminar on function spaces go back to early 1970s when Svatopluk Fučík, Oldřich John and Alois Kufner organized a seminar at the
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University. The seminar was run by a rather informal group of mathematicians interested
in the study of function spaces and related problems including their applications in the theory of regularity of solutions to
elliptic partial differential equations. A few years later, the seminar was
transferred to the Mathematical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy
of Sciences. Here, the core of the function spaces group was formed by its natural leader Alois Kufner, and a few mathematicians from the next generation,
namely, Miroslav Krbec, Bohumír Opic and Jiří Rákosník. Since the very
beginning the seminar was devoted to the rapidly developing topic of function spaces, weighted
inequalities, integral operators, embedding theorems, and their aplications in PDEs,
Fourier analysis, and harmonic analysis. In the 1980's
the seminar attracted the attention of several (then) young mathematicians who eventually
wrote their diploma and PhD. (CSc.) theses under the supervision of founders of the seminar
and eventually joined the group as regular members. This generation included Petr Gurka, Ondrej Kováčik, Aleš Nekvinda, Luboš Pick and Jan Lang.
In early 1990s, through the contacts with Georgian School in Tbilisi, the group was joined by Amiran Gogatishvili. During 1990s and 2000s, the seminar was
informally headed by Bohumír Opic, in 2010s and 2020s by Luboš Pick, and since 2020s by Stanislav Hencl, Lenka Slavíková and Anna Balci.
The activities of the seminar have always been reflecting current advances of the field. Important papers and new monographs have been gone through in detail and
vigorously discussed. As a consequence, since the 1990's the topics were enriched of theory of interpolation, spaces with logarithmic smoothness, Hardy-type inequalities
of higher order and weighted inequalities for operators acting on monotone functions. Since the outbreak of the 21st century,
the topics of research were extended to rearrangement-invariant spaces with focus on their optimality in Sobolev embeddings, and more.
The seminar never witnessed any lack of students, PhD. students, and young mathematicians. Especially around 2000 and the following two and half decades,
we saw a continuous flow of students
who joined the activities of the seminar, and some have stayed. The (vastly incomplete) list includes
David Opěla, Jan Vybíral, Stanislav Hencl, Petr Honzík, Luboš Dostál, Eva Kaspříková, David Pražák, Lukáš Malý,
Pavla Hofmanová, Pavel Milar, Eva Pernecká, Filip Soudský,
Kristýna Kuncová, Miloslav Holík, Rastislav Oľhava,
Martin Křepela, Martin Franců, Vít Musil, Lenka Slavíková, Eva Buriánková, Zdeněk Mihula, Ondřej Bouchala, Dalimil Peša, Hana Turčinová, and many others.
The members of the seminar are involved in organizing the regular international meetings such as the Spring Schools on Nonlinear Analysis,
Function Spaces and Applications
(NAFSA - since 1978), international conferences on Function Spaces, Diferential Operators and Nonlinear Analysis (FSDONA - since 1988, jointly with
mathematicians from Finland and Germany), or spring schools on Function Spaces and related topics held every two years at Paseky nad Jizerou (since 1999).