Dr. James Arthur

The focus of Arthur's efforts in recent years has been the trace formula for groups of rank greater than one, which indeed, although he owes a good deal to his predecessors, can properly be called his creation. His first papers on the trace formula for groups of rank one were on the whole a development of ideas of Selberg, but his more recent work takes an entirely different approach, raises the subject to a new level, is chock full of ideas and techniques, and reveals Arthur as the current leader in the study of harmonic analysis on reductive groups and in the purely analytic theory of automorphic forms.