Math

Auhor's comments: Although I have the feeling of having left unfinished almost every mathematical project undertaken, the study of endoscopy and the stabilized trace formula was, in this respect, one of the most unsatisfactory of all. It went on for a very long time without reaching any very cogent conclusions. This now seems with hindsight to have been inevitable. The efforts of a number of excellent mathematicians make it clear that the problems to be solved, many of which remain outstanding, were much more difficult than I appreciated.

Editorial comments (2024-01-02): Dwork's thesis referred to below is available here: http://alpha.math.uga.edu/~lorenz/articles.html

Author's comments: Although a part of these notes have circulated as a rather bulky preprint, they remained, for reasons to be described, incomplete, and even the parts completed were never all typed.

Author's comments: This paper has appeared in the Shalika volume, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. The published paper is not exactly the same as that here because the text was modified by the Press, apparently for reasons of economy. Among other things footnotes were removed and this required somewhat brutal measures. The version in this collection is the preferred version.