The notion of curvature played a basic role in the development of
geometry since the XIX century with the initial work of many
mathematicians, among them Gauss and Riemann. Even though the
curvature tensor of a semi-Riemannian manifold carries a lot of
information, it is a di_cult object to deal with. Therefore, many
attempts have been done in considering other kinds of objects which,
being easier to handle, somehow reect the properties of the curvature
tensor. Among those objects, curvature operators have received much
attention for the last years. Indeed, motivated by a conjecture of
Osserman in the 90's, spectral properties of Jacobi operators,
generalized Jacobi operators, skew-symmetric curvature operators,
Szabó operators, …have be...