This volume constitutes the proceedings of a conference, “On Certain L-functions”, held July 23-27, 2007 at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. The conference was organised in honour of the 60th birthday of Freydoon Shahidi, widely recognised as having made groundbreaking contributions to the Langlands programme.

The articles in this volume represent a snapshot of the state of the field from several viewpoints. Contributions illuminate various areas of the study of geometric, analytic, and number theoretic aspects of automorphic forms and their L-functions, and both local and global theory are addressed.

Topics discussed in the articles include Langlands functoriality, the Rankin-Selberg method, the Langlands-Shahidi method, motivic Galois groups, Shimura varieties, orbital integrals, representations of p-adic groups, Plancherel formula and its consequences, the Gross-Prasad conjecture, and more. The volume also includes an expository article on Shahidi's contributions to the field, which serves as an introduction to the subject.

Experts will find this book a useful reference, and beginning researchers will be able to use it to survey major results in the Langlands programme.