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The work of Robert Langlands

Miscellaneous items

Harish-Chandra


Harish-Chandra in 1974
(Photograph courtesy of Lily Harish-Chandra)

Harish-Chandra in 1981
(Photograph by Herman Landshof -
courtesy of the Institute archives)

Harish-Chandra 1923-1983

First published in the Biog. Mem. of Fellows of the Roy. Soc. 31 (1985).


A bust of André Weil sculpted by Charlotte Langlands
(now located in the mathematics common room at the Institute)

André Weil (1906-98) - one of the century's most influential pure mathematicians

This first appeared in Nature 396, 29 October 1998, p. 848.

Commencement address at the University of Toronto, June, 1993

Interview with Stéphane Durand from Québec Science, May, 2000

Robert Langlands in 1967

(Photograph taken in application
for a Turkish visa)

Response upon receiving the Grande Médaille d'Or of the Académie Francaise in November, 2000


Solomon Bochner in his office at Rice University
(Photograph courtesy of William Veech
and the Rice University Archives, Woodson Research Center)

The practice of mathematics - a series of popular lectures at the Institute during the academic year 1999-2000.

The talks were recorded at the Institute, and were put into RealVideo G2 format with the help of Dave Morrison. They can be found at http://www.math.duke.edu/langlands/.


(Photographs taken by C. J. Mozzochi in one of the lectures)

The trace formula and its applications (an introduction to the work of James Arthur)

First appeared in the Canadian Math. Bull. XX (2001).


Jim Arthur at the Institute, April 2001
(Click here for a photograph of Jim lecturing.)

Laudatio (on the occasion of an award to Günter Harder)

Langlands' comment: The following brief discourse was delivered in Erlangen in October, 2004, on the occasion of the award of the Karl Georg Christian von Staudt-Preis to Günter Harder. It does not do justice to his many contributions to mathematics, but does attempt to express my great admiration of him and my great respect for the passion and the tenacity with which he continues to reflect on what seem to me some of the central problems of the modern theory of numbers.

At one or two points in the text there are references to diagrams. The diagrams are hardly necessary for a mathematically experienced reader and are not included.

Review of SL2(R) by Serge Lang

First appeared in B. A. M. S. 82 (1976).

Review of The theory of Eisenstein systems by M. Scott Osborne and Garth Warner

First appeared in B. A. M. S. 9 (1983).

Review of Harish-Chandra's Collected Works

First appeared in Bull. London Math. Soc. 17 (1985)

Review of Elliptic Curves by Anthony Knapp

First appeared in B. A. M. S. 30 (1994).



Portrait engraved by van Schooten the younger, editor and translator of the Latin edition of La géometrie.
Descartes said of it, "La barbe & les habits ne ressemblent aucunement."
(From the Rosenwald Collection at the Institute in Princeton)

Euclid's windows and our mirrors - review of Euclid's Window by Leonard Mlodinow

First appeared in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, May 2002.

Benim tanidigim Cahit Arf (Recollections of a year in Turkey with Cahit Arf)

Langlands' comment: This note contains a few recollections of a year I spent in Turkey in 1967/68, where my office was adjacent to that of Cahit Arf, known, among other things, for the Hasse-Arf theorem and the Arf invariant. It was he who referred me -- as I was first attempting to define local factors for Artin L-functions -- to the paper of Hasse published in the Acta Salmanticensia. Hasse's paper was my first introduction to the methods that had already been introduced for calculating and comparing the -factors. The note was published in the winter number of Ali Nesin's Matematik Dünyasi for the year 2004.

Descartes ile Fermat (in Turkish)

Langlands' comment: The article is an exercise in the reading of mathematics from earlier times. An explanation of Descartes's solution of the problem of Pappus as included in the appendix "La géométrie" to "Discours de la méthode" and an explanation of a solution to another form of the same problem by Fermat, described briefly in a letter included in his collected works, are taken as an occasion to compare the mathematical styles of the two men and to observe their mutual debt to Apollonius as well as the differences in their depth of understanding of his work. The purpose is not scientific or historic; it is simply to encourage the private reading of classical mathematics by those who like me have no special knowledge of the history of mathematics.

This article appeared on pages 54-61 of the mathematical magazine Matematik Dünyasi, No. 2, 2005. The magazine (as mentioned above, edited by Ali Nesin), is published in Istanbul and has a wide circulation among mathematics students and teachers in Turkey.

A review of Haruzo Hida's p-adic automorphic forms on Shimura varieties

To appear in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, autumn 2006.

Langlands' comment: This review comes with a supplement (footnote) that contains the comments of several leading specialists and will be much more useful to the potential reader of the book, whether a novice or a specialist, than the review itself.

Just after the review itself comes a collection of remarks about a preliminary version of it by Langlands as well as by Michael Harris, Ching-Li Chai, Richard Taylor, J. Tilouine, Ralph Greenberg, and Laurent Clozel.