Robert P. Langlands

Author's Comments: Although the principal purpose of this paper was to review how the Selberg trace formula is combined with character formulas to calculate the dimension of various spaces of automorphic forms. it is included as a paper on representation theory because the most influential observation in the paper was the description of a possible realization of the discrete series representations on spaces of \(L^2\)-cohomology.

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.

This is a Russian variant of the previous text, not a translation.