Robert P. Langlands

Editorial comments: The letter to Weil included a number of striking conjectures which eventually changed much of the direction of research in automorphic forms. Some of their consequences were explained in a graduate course given at Princeton in the spring of 1967, and then things were put in a somewhat wider context in a series of lectures at Yale later that Spring. These notes were previously published as the first of the Yale Mathematical Monographs.

Editorial comments: In January of 1967, while he was at Princeton University, Langlands wrote a letter of 17 hand-written pages to Andre Weil outlining what quickly became known as `the Langlands conjectures'. This letter even today is worth reading carefully, although its notation is by present standards somewhat clumsy. It was in this letter that what later became known as the `\(L\)-group' first made its appearance, like Gargantua, surprisingly mature.

Editorial comments: This originally appeared as a supplement to an article by A. Borel and H. Jacquet in Automorphic forms, representations, and L-functions, Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics XXXIII, AMS, 1979.

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