Ramesh Gangolli – författare

This volume is to be regarded as the fifth in the series of Harish-Chandra’s collected papers, continuing the four volumes already published by Springer-Verlag. Because of manifold illnesses in the last ten years of his life, a large part of Harish-Chandra’s work remained unpublished. The present volume deals with those unpublished manuscripts involving real groups, and includes only those pertaining to the theorems which Harish-Chandra had announced without proofs.An attempt has been made by the volume editors to bring out this material in a more coherent form than in the handwritten manuscripts, although nothing essentially new has been added and editorial comments are kept to a minimum. The papers deal with several topics: characters on non-connected real groups, Fourier transforms of orbital integrals, Whittaker theory, and supertempered characters. The generality of Harish-Chandra’s results in these papers far exceeds anything in print. The volume will be of great interest to all mathematicians interested in Lie groups, and all who have an interest in the opus of a twentieth century giant. Harish-Chandra was a great mathematician, perhaps one of the greatest of the second half of the twentieth century.

Analysis on Symmetric spaces, or more generally, on homogeneous spaces of semisimple Lie groups, is a subject that has undergone a vigorous development in recent years, and has become a central part of contemporary mathematics. This is only to be expected, since homogeneous spaces and group representations arise naturally in diverse contexts ranging from Number theory and Geometry to Particle Physics and Polymer Chemistry. Its explosive growth sometimes makes it difficult to realize that it is actually relatively young as mathematical theories go. The early ideas in the subject (as is the case with many others) go back to Elie Cart an and Hermann Weyl who studied the compact symmetric spaces in the 1930''s. However its full development did not begin until the 1950''s when Gel''fand and Harish­ Chandra dared to dream of a theory of representations that included all semisimple Lie groups. Harish-Chandra''s theory of spherical functions was essentially complete in the late 1950''s, and was to prove to be the forerunner of his monumental work on harmonic analysis on reductive groups that has inspired a whole generation of mathematicians. It is the harmonic analysis of spherical functions on symmetric spaces, that is at the focus of this book. The fundamental questions of harmonic analysis on symmetric spaces involve an interplay of the geometric, analytical, and algebraic aspects of these spaces. They have therefore attracted a great deal of attention, and there have been many excellent expositions of the themes that are characteristic of this subject.