Converse theorems, functoriality, and applications (Q2471439)

The article is a review paper intended for a broader mathematical audience. The author describes the history and the development of the various converse theorems from the classical to modern variants. Firstly, the author recalls the theory of classical modular forms and the way in which one can attach an \(L\)-function to it. If this modular form is cuspidal, Hecke had shown that the attached \(L\)-function is nice (precise meaning of being ``nice'' is also given). Hecke had discovered that there is a converse to it; namely, if the Dirichlet series is nice, then it is actually an \(L\)-function attached to a certain modular form. Also, Weil proved a similar converse theorems for modular forms with respect to some congruence subgroups (not necessarily the whole \(SL(2,Z)\)); then the notion of being ``nice'' has to be changed to ``appropriately nice.'' Further, the author puts this considerations in the context of the modularity questions Hecke and Weil were interested in, namely ``attaching modular forms to arithmetic objects--mediated by \(L\)-functions.'' Also, the author gives further explanation of the importance of \(L\)-functions of arithmetic objects recalling Birch and Swinnerton--Dyer Conjecture for elliptic curves. After this classical situations, the author recall the construction of the adele ring over a number field, and in general, of the reductive algebraic groups over adeles where he actually considers only the \(GL_n\) case. He introduces \(L^2\)-spaces of automorphic forms, and cuspidal automorphic representations and describes the way in which Jacquet, Langlands, Piatetski-Shapiro and Shalika introduced the theory of \(L\)-functions for cuspidal automorphic representations. And these automorphic \(L\)-functions turned to be nice. The author then reviews converse theorems and conjectures in this new setting. As an application of these results in the representation-theoretical field, the author discusses the Langlands' functoriality. Before that he introduces Langlands Conjectures about the parametrization of the (global and local) representations of \(GL_n\) in terms of the representations of the Galois or, more precisely, Weil--Deligne group of the global or local field. He addresses known results about Langlands conjectures for \(GL_n\) over various fields. After a step-by-step description of the way in which the converse theorems enter the proofs of the global functoriality from a split reductive group \(H\) to \(GL_n\) he gives the examples of the already established global functorialities. After the applications of the converse theorems in the representation theory, the author discusses the applications in the number theory. He discusses the Ramanujan Conjecture and the Generalized Ramanujan Conjecture for \(GL_2\) and \(GL_n.\) As the second application, the author discusses Hilbert's eleventh problem and relates it to the control of the special values of certain \(L\)-functions. At the end, the author discusses two recently established cases of modularity: the modularity of elliptic curves and the global Langlands conjecture for \(GL_n\) over a function field and notes the parts the converse theorems played in their proofs. The style of the paper is informal, without technical details, and yet it gives a nice overview of different appearances of the converse theorems in classical and modern setting with the insight in some very recent accomplishments.