Serge Lang was an iconic figure in mathematics, both for his own important work and for the indelible impact he left on the field of mathematics, on his students, and on his colleagues. Over the course of his career, Lang traversed a tremendous amount of mathematical ground. As he moved from subject to subject, he found analogies that led to important questions in such areas as number theory, arithmetic geometry, and the theory of negatively curved spaces. Lang's conjectures will keep many mathematicians occupied far into the future. In the spirit of Lang's vast contribution to mathematics, this memorial volume contains articles by prominent mathematicians in a variety of areas of the field, namely Number Theory, Analysis, and Geometry, representing Lang's own breadth of interest and impact. A special introduction by John Tate includes a brief and fascinating account of the Serge Lang's life. This volume's group of 6 editors are also highly prominent mathematicians and were close to Serge Lang, both academically and personally. The volume is suitable to research mathematicians in the areas of Number Theory, Analysis, and Geometry.

A modern approach to number theory through a blending of complementary algebraic and analytic perspectives, emphasising harmonic analysis on topological groups. The main goal is to cover John Tates visionary thesis, giving virtually all of the necessary analytic details and topological preliminaries -- technical prerequisites that are often foreign to the typical, more algebraically inclined number theorist. While most of the existing treatments of Tates thesis are somewhat terse and less than complete, the intent here is to be more leisurely, more comprehensive, and more comprehensible. While the choice of objects and methods is naturally guided by specific mathematical goals, the approach is by no means narrow. In fact, the subject matter at hand is germane not only to budding number theorists, but also to students of harmonic analysis or the representation theory of Lie groups. The text addresses students who have taken a year of graduate-level course in algebra, analysis, and topology. Moreover, the work will act as a good reference for working mathematicians interested in any of these fields.

Serge Lang was an iconic figure in mathematics, both for his own important work and for the indelible impact he left on the field of mathematics, on his students, and on his colleagues. Over the course of his career, Lang traversed a tremendous amount of mathematical ground. As he moved from subject to subject, he found analogies that led to important questions in such areas as number theory, arithmetic geometry, and the theory of negatively curved spaces. Lang's conjectures will keep many mathematicians occupied far into the future. In the spirit of Lang's vast contribution to mathematics, this memorial volume contains articles by prominent mathematicians in a variety of areas of the field, namely Number Theory, Analysis, and Geometry, representing Lang's own breadth of interest and impact. A special introduction by John Tate includes a brief and fascinating account of the Serge Lang's life. This volume's group of 6 editors are also highly prominent mathematicians and were close to Serge Lang, both academically and personally. The volume is suitable to research mathematicians in the areas of Number Theory, Analysis, and Geometry.

A modern approach to number theory through a blending of complementary algebraic and analytic perspectives, emphasising harmonic analysis on topological groups. The main goal is to cover John Tates visionary thesis, giving virtually all of the necessary analytic details and topological preliminaries -- technical prerequisites that are often foreign to the typical, more algebraically inclined number theorist. While most of the existing treatments of Tates thesis are somewhat terse and less than complete, the intent here is to be more leisurely, more comprehensive, and more comprehensible. While the choice of objects and methods is naturally guided by specific mathematical goals, the approach is by no means narrow. In fact, the subject matter at hand is germane not only to budding number theorists, but also to students of harmonic analysis or the representation theory of Lie groups. The text addresses students who have taken a year of graduate-level course in algebra, analysis, and topology. Moreover, the work will act as a good reference for working mathematicians interested in any of these fields.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of a conference, "On Certain L-functions", held July 23-27, 2007 at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. The conference was organised in honour of the 60th birthday of Freydoon Shahidi, widely recognised as having made groundbreaking contributions to the Langlands programme. The articles in this volume represent a snapshot of the state of the field from several viewpoints. Contributions illuminate various areas of the study of geometric, analytic, and number theoretic aspects of automorphic forms and their L-functions, and both local and global theory are addressed. Topics discussed in the articles include Langlands functoriality, the Rankin-Selberg method, the Langlands-Shahidi method, motivic Galois groups, Shimura varieties, orbital integrals, representations of p-adic groups, Plancherel formula and its consequences, the Gross-Prasad conjecture, and more. The volume also includes an expository article on Shahidi's contributions to the field, which serves as an introduction to the subject. Experts will find this book a useful reference, and beginning researchers will be able to use it to survey major results in the Langlands programme.