Preface

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.