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 Because of manifold illnesses in the last ten years of his life, a large part of Harish-Chandra’s work remained unpublished. The present volume deals with those unpublished manuscripts involving real groups, and includes only those pertaining to the theorems which Harish-Chandra had announced without proofs.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.