BULLETIN (New Series) OF THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY Volume 50, Number 2, April 2013, Pages 267–320 S 0273-0979(2013)01404-6 Article electronically published on January 14, 2013
THE ROLE OF THE RAMANUJAN CONJECTURE IN ANALYTIC NUMBER THEORY
VALENTIN BLOMER AND FARRELL BRUMLEY Dedicated to the 125th birthday of Srinivasa Ramanujan
Abstract. We discuss progress towards the Ramanujan conjecture for the group GLn and its relation to various other topics in analytic number theory.
Contents 1. Introduction 267 2. Background on Maaß forms 270 3. The Ramanujan conjecture for Maaß forms 276 4. The Ramanujan conjecture for GLn 283 5. Numerical improvements towards the Ramanujan conjecture and applications 290 6. L-functions 294 7. Techniques over Q 298 8. Techniques over number fields 302 9. Perspectives 305 J.-P. Serre’s 1981 letter to J.-M. Deshouillers 307 Acknowledgments 313 About the authors 313 References 313
1. Introduction In a remarkable article [111], published in 1916, Ramanujan considered the func- tion ∞ ∞ Δ(z)=(2π)12e2πiz (1 − e2πinz)24 =(2π)12 τ(n)e2πinz, n=1 n=1 where z ∈ H = {z ∈ C |z>0} is in the upper half-plane. The right hand side is understood as a definition for the arithmetic function τ(n) that nowadays bears
Received by the editors June 8, 2012. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 11F70. Key words and phrases. Ramanujan conjecture, L-functions, number fields, non-vanishing, functoriality. The first author was supported by the Volkswagen Foundation and a Starting Grant of the European Research Council. The second author is partially supported by the ANR grant ArShiFo ANR-BLANC-114-2010 and by the Advanced Research Grant 228304 from the European Research Council.