The representation theory of locally compact groups has been vig orously developed in the past twenty-five years or so; of the various branches of this theory, one of the most attractive (and formidable) is the representation theory of semi-simple Lie groups which, to a great extent, is the creation of a single man: Harish-Chandra. The chief objective of the present volume and its immediate successor is to provide a reasonably self-contained introduction to Harish-Chandra's theory. Granting cer tain basic prerequisites (cf. infra), we have made an effort to give full details and complete proofs of the theorems on which the theory rests. The structure of this volume and its successor is as follows. Each book is divided into chapters; each chapter is divided into sections; each section into numbers. We then use the decimal system of reference; for example, 1. 3. 2 refers to the second number in the third section of the first chapter. Theorems, Propositions, Lemmas, and Corollaries are listed consecutively throughout any given number. Numbers which are set in fine print may be omitted at a first reading. There are a variety of Exam ples scattered throughout the text; the reader, if he is so inclined, can view them as exercises ad libitum. The Appendices to the text collect certain ancillary results which will be used on and off in the systematic exposi tion; a reference of the form A2.

This book presents the text of the lectures which were given at the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Representations of Lie groups and Harmonic Analysis which was held in Liege from September 5 to September 17, 1977. The general aim of this Summer School was to give a coordinated intro duction to the theory of representations of semisimple Lie groups and to non-commutative harmonic analysis on these groups, together with some glance at physical applications and at the related subject of random walks. As will appear to the reader, the order of the papers - which follows relatively closely the order of the lectures which were actually give- follows a logical pattern. The two first papers are introductory: the one by R. Blattner describes in a very progressive way a path going from standard Fourier analysis on IR" to non-commutative harmonic analysis on a locally compact group; the paper by J. Wolf describes the structure of semisimple Lie groups, the finite-dimensional representations of these groups and introduces basic facts about infinite-dimensional unitary representations. Two of the editors want to thank particularly these two lecturers who were very careful to pave the way for the later lectures. Both these chapters give also very useful guidelines to the relevant literature.

Group-theoretic methods have taken an increasingly prominent role in analysis. Some of this change has been due to the writings of Sigurdur Helgason. This book is an introduction to such methods on spaces with symmetry given by the action of a Lie group. The introductory chapter is a self-contained account of the analysis on surfaces of constant curvature. Later chapters cover general cases of the Radon transform, spherical functions, invariant operators, compact symmetric spaces and other topics. This book, together with its companion volume, Geometric Analysis on Symmetric Spaces (AMS Mathematical Surveys and Monographs series, vol. 39, 1994), has become the standard text for this approach to geometric analysis. Sigurdur Helgason was awarded the Steele Prize for outstanding mathematical exposition for Groups and Geometric Analysis and Differential Geometry, Lie Groups and Symmetric Spaces.

The principal aim of this book is to give an introduction to harmonic analysis and the theory of unitary representations of Lie groups. The second edition has been brought up to date with a number of textual changes in each of the five chapters, a new appendix on Fatou's theorem has been added in connection with the limits of discrete series, and the bibliography has been tripled in length.

Groups & Geometric Analysis

The central result of this paper is a characterization of the image of [script]C[superscript italic]p([italic]G) under the operator-valued Fourier transform. The main thread through the paper is a careful analysis of the matrix coefficients for the discrete series and principal series of representations of [bold]SL (2, [bold]R). The paper is long, very technical and is not for the faint-hearted.