Submitted by apulido on
Author's comments: These terse comments were intended as a suggestion not to read the Mostow lecture or listen to it with preconceptions about the nature of a geometric theory.
Submitted by apulido on
Author's comments: The book La formule des traces tordue needed no introduction from me, but I did write it at the authors' request, in part because I was troubled by the circumstances of its appearance. I have, I believe, as a mathematician led a much richer intellectual life than the circumstances of my childhood would have normally permitted. So I am distressed by the diminishing possibilities of our profession and cannot always resist expressing my uneasiness and disappointment in a somewhat dyspeptic voice.
Submitted by apulido on
Author's comments: Problems of endoscopy first arose as I began the study of Shimura varieties in Bonn during the academic year 1970/71. I reflected on them for a long time, in part in collaboration with Labesse, in part in collaboration with Shelstad. I presented a fairly mature form of my reflections in the Paris lectures, Les débuts d'une formule des traces stable, in which the presence of a major obstacle, overcome considerably later through the efforts of a number of mathematicians, in particular Waldspurger and Ngô, was clearly described.
Submitted by apulido on
Author's comments (Apr. 6, 2014): The concept ``Langlands program'' appears in the title of an article by Stephen Gelbart in the BAMS of April, 1984, but Gelbart himself assured me that it was already current, at least orally, before then. He also drew my attention to a phrase of Armand Borel in his Bourbaki seminar of June, 1975, ``plutôt un vaste programme, élaboré par R. P. Langlands depuis environ 1967.'' I do not recall that I was uneasy with the phrase ``Langlands program'' in 1984, but it then referred principally to matters on which I myself had long reflected.
Submitted by dloring on
Submitted by dloring on
Submitted by apulido on
Author's comments: These two letters were, in fact, electronic messages and were written very recently, in December, 2013. They were inspired by a conversation with Julia Mueller and Michael Volpato, in which I tried to explain to them the origins of the general definition of automorphic \(L\)-functions.
Submitted by apulido on
Editorial comments: This essay was first posted here on December 20, 2013. The latest version dates to May 16, 2014.
Submitted by apulido on