Automorphic Forms and Related Geometry: Assessing the Legacy of I.I. Piatetski-Shapiro

Book excerpt: This volume contains the proceedings of the conference Automorphic Forms and Related Geometry: Assessing the Legacy of I.I. Piatetski-Shapiro, held from April 23-27, 2012, at Yale University, New Haven, CT. Ilya I. Piatetski-Shapiro, who passed away on 21 February 2009, was a leading figure in the theory of automorphic forms. The conference attempted both to summarize and consolidate the progress that was made during Piatetski-Shapiro's lifetime by him and a substantial group of his co-workers, and to promote future work by identifying fruitful directions of further investigation. It was organized around several themes that reflected Piatetski-Shapiro's main foci of work and that have promise for future development: functoriality and converse theorems; local and global -functions and their periods; -adic -functions and arithmetic geometry; complex geometry; and analytic number theory. In each area, there were talks to review the current state of affairs with special attention to Piatetski-Shapiro's contributions, and other talks to report on current work and to outline promising avenues for continued progress. The contents of this volume reflect most of the talks that were presented at the conference as well as a few additional contributions. They all represent various aspects of the legacy of Piatetski-Shapiro.