Math

Introduction to a book of Labesse-Waldspurger

Author: 
Robert P. Langlands
Last Name: 
Langlands
Type: 
article

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.

Publication Type: 
Publications
School of Mathematics: 

Introduction

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.

School of Mathematics: 

Message to Peter Sarnak

Year: 
February 18, 2014
Type: 
article

Author's comments (2014-04-06): 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.

School of Mathematics: 

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