Commutant lifting theorem and interpolation in discrete nest algebras

Abstract

Ball in [Ba] showed that the commutant lifting theorem for the nest algebras due to Paulsen and Power gives a unified approach to a wide class of interpolation problems for nest algebras. By restricting our attention to the case when nest algebras associated with the problems are discrete we derive a variant of the commutant lifting theorem which avoids language of representation theory and which is sufficient to treat an analog of the generalized Schur-Nevannlinna-Pick (SNP) problem in the setting of upper triangular operators.