1997 CRM-Fields Prize awarded to James Arthur

James Arthur is currently Professor of Mathematics at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University in 1970, and taught at Princeton, Yale and Duke universities before coming to the University of Toronto in 1979. He has also worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France, and the Max-Planck Institute in Bonn. In 1994, he delivered the Hermann Weyl Lecture at the Institute for Advanced Study.

His research interests are in automorphic forms, number theory, representation theory and harmonic analysis on real and p-adic groups. He is an associate editor of the following publications: International Mathematics Research Notices, Journal of the American Mathematical Society and Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

James Arthur (University of Toronto) gave a conference at the CRM on April 4, 1997.

Harmonic Analysis and Trace Formulas

Summary: Harmonic analysis could be interpreted broadly as a general principal which relates analytic and geometric objects. Examples occur throughout many areas of mathematics. In group theory, the geometric objects are conjugacy classes, the analytic objects are irreducible characters, and the two can be related by means of trace formulas. We shall give a general introduction to trace formulas, and their applications to group representations and number theory.