Harmonic Analysis On Symmetric Spaces And Applications I

Harmonic Analysis on Symmetric Spaces and Applications II

Well, finally, here it is-the long-promised "Revenge of the Higher Rank Symmetric Spaces and Their Fundamental Domains." When I began work on it in 1977, I would probably have stopped immediately if someone had told me that ten years would pass before I would declare it "finished." Yes, I am declaring it finished-though certainly not perfected. There is a large amount of work going on at the moment as the piles of preprints reach the ceiling. Nevertheless, it is summer and the ocean calls. So I am not going to spend another ten years revising and polishing. But, gentle reader, do send me your corrections and even your preprints. Thanks to your work, there is an Appendix at the end of this volume with corrections to Volume I. I said it all in the Preface to Volume I. So I will try not to repeat myself here. Yes, the "recent trends" mentioned in that Preface are still just as recent.

Harmonic Analysis on Symmetric Spaces and Applications I

Since its beginnings with Fourier (and as far back as the Babylonian astron omers), harmonic analysis has been developed with the goal of unraveling the mysteries of the physical world of quasars, brain tumors, and so forth, as well as the mysteries of the nonphysical, but no less concrete, world of prime numbers, diophantine equations, and zeta functions. Quoting Courant and Hilbert, in the preface to the first German edition of Methods of Mathematical Physics: "Recent trends and fashions have, however, weakened the connection between mathematics and physics. " Such trends are still in evidence, harmful though they may be. My main motivation in writing these notes has been a desire to counteract this tendency towards specialization and describe appli cations of harmonic analysis in such diverse areas as number theory (which happens to be my specialty), statistics, medicine, geophysics, and quantum physics. I remember being quite surprised to learn that the subject is useful. My graduate eduation was that of the 1960s. The standard mathematics graduate course proceeded from Definition 1. 1. 1 to Corollary 14. 5. 59, with no room in between for applications, motivation, history, or references to related work. My aim has been to write a set of notes for a very different sort of course.

Harmonic Analysis on Symmetric Spaces and Applications I