Robert P. Langlands

Authors's comments: These are my responses to questions of Farzin Barekat, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, where I was an undergraduate student for four years and a graduate student for one year. The questions and my responses were transmitted electronically. An abbreviated version of my responses will be published in a newsletter of the mathematics department of the university.

Solomon Bochner in his office at Rice University
(Photograph courtesy of William Veech and the Rice University Archives, Woodson Research Center)

Author's comments: The article is an exercise in the reading of mathematics from earlier times.

Author's comments: This note contains a few recollections of a year I spent in Turkey in 1967/68, where my office was adjacent to that of Cahit Arf, known, among other things, for the Hasse-Arf theorem and the Arf invariant. It was he who referred me---as I was first attempting to define local \(\epsilon\)-factors for Artin \(L\)-functions---to the paper of Hasse published in the Acta Salmanticensia. Hasse's paper was my first introduction to the methods that had already been introduced for calculating and comparing the \(\epsilon\)-factors.