M. I. Graev – författare

The unifying theme of this collection of papers by the very creative Russian mathematician I. M. Gelfand and his co-workers is the representation theory of groups and lattices. Two of the papers were inspired by application to theoretical physics; the others are pure mathematics though all the papers will interest mathematicians at quite opposite ends of the subject. Dr. G. Segal and Professor C-M. Ringel have written introductions to the papers which explain the background, put them in perspective and make them accessible to those with no specialist knowledge in the area.

The first systematic theory of generalized functions (also known as distributions) was created in the early 1950s, although some aspects were developed much earlier, most notably in the definition of the Green's function in mathematics and in the work of Paul Dirac on quantum electrodynamics in physics. The six-volume collection, Generalized Functions, written by I. M. Gel'fand and co-authors and published in Russian between 1958 and 1966, gives an introduction to generalized functions and presents various applications to analysis, PDE, stochastic processes, and representation theory. The unifying theme of Volume 6 is the study of representations of the general linear group of order two over various fields and rings of number-theoretic nature, most importantly over local fields ($p$-adic fields and fields of power series over finite fields) and over the ring of adeles. Representation theory of the latter group naturally leads to the study of automorphic functions and related number-theoretic problems. The book contains a wealth of information about discrete subgroups and automorphic representations, and can be used both as a very good introduction to the subject and as a valuable reference.