The idea for this special issue surfaced during the
one-day conference at Caltech in memory of Olga Taussky-Todd
on April 13, 1996. The speakers at the conference were B.
Gross, R. Guralnick, P. Hanlon, K. Ribet and H. Shapiro, and
we thank them for their contributions. It was decided soon
after to have additional contributors to the special issue.
We thank the editorial board of the Pacific Journal of
Mathematics (PJM), and Alice Chang in particular, for
enthusiastically supporting us in this endeavor, and for
speeding up the publication.
All the articles in this issue were thoroughly refereed,
and we thank the unnamed referees for their careful and
timely job. Every article, except for one - by H. Kisilevsky
on a part of Olga's work, is a research paper. We thank all
the authors, first for contributing to the issue, and then
for putting up with our demands for revision. The articles by
R.P. Langlands and I. Piatetski-Shapiro have widely
circulated for many years as oft-quoted preprints, and we
thank them for allowing their publication here.
We thank Julie Honig of PJM for her constant help. Thanks
are also due to Vladimir Frenkel of the International Press,
and Marge D'Elia, Jackie Cassidy, Kyle Gary and Gloria
Cousins of Caltech for their assistance. We thank John Todd
for his keen interest and for providing us with a copy of the
photograph of Olga, taken by T. Apostol in 1978, which
appears on the first page of the issue. We thank R.
Guralnick, one of the regular editors of PJM, for his
editorial help. Finally, we thank PJM and Caltech for their
financial support.
|
