Complex symmetric operators and applications

We study a few classes of Hilbert space operators whose matrix representations are complex symmetric with respect to a preferred orthonormal basis. The existence of this additional symmetry has notable implications and, in particular, it explains from a unifying point of view some classical results. We explore applications of this symmetry to Jordan canonical models, self-adjoint extensions of symmetric operators, rank-one unitary perturbations of the compressed shift, Darlington synthesis and matrix-valued inner functions, and free bounded analytic interpolation in the disk.