These two volumes constitute a selection of papers of V. S. Varadarajan. An earlier volume of Selected Papers was published by the American Mathematical Society and International Press in 1998.

The papers reproduced in these two volumes include not only the articles published since 1998 but also some important papers published earlier which were not included in the original Selected Papers for reasons of space and other limitations.

The current volumes contain the papers on fundamental questions of individual and families of meromorphic differential equations that are treated by a new group theoretic and functional approach; papers on representation theory of Lie groups; papers on foundations of physics, supersymmetry, and P-adic aspects of quantum physical theories; papers on analysis, especially oscillatory integrals, on semi-simple lie groups, their conjugacy classes, and their flag manifolds; and finally, several review articles, both personal and mathematical, on a number of the above topics.

The volumes are divided into sections by topics and in each section the editors have included a brief summary of the contents of the section as well as putting the papers in the historical context and, in the process, raising interesting new problems.