Stephen James Rallis (May 17, 1942 – April 17, 2012) was an American mathematician who worked on group representations, automorphic forms, the Siegel–Weil formula, and Langlands L-functions.
Career Rallis received a B.A. in 1964 from Harvard University, a Ph.D. in 1968 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and spent 1968–1970 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. After two years at Stony Brook, two years at Universite de Strasbourg, and several visiting positions, he joined the faculty at Ohio State University in 1977 and stayed there for the rest of his career.
Work Beginning in the 1970s, Rallis and Gérard Schiffmann wrote a series of papers on the Weil representation. This led to Rallis's work with Kudla in which they developed a far-reaching generalization of the Siegel–Weil formula: the regularized Siegel–Weil formula and the first term identity.W.T. Gan, Y. Qiu, and S. Takeda (2014)"The Regularized Siegel–Weil Formula (The Second Term Identity) and the Rallis Inner Product Formula," Inventiones Math. 198, 739–831 These results have prompted other mathematicians to extend Siegel–Weil to other cases.J. Cogdell, H. Jacquet, D. Jiang, S. Kudla, (2015), eds. "Steve Rallis (1942–2012)," Journal of Number Theory, 146, 1–3 Rallis' 1984 paper giving proofs of certain examples of the Howe duality conjecture was the start of his work on what is now known as "The Rallis Inner Product Formula" which relates the inner product of a pair of theta functions to a special value or residue of a Langlands L-function.J. Cogdell and D. Jiang, coordinating eds.,"Remembering Steve Rallis," Notices of the AMS 60 (2013), issue 4, 466–469 This cornerstone of what Wee Teck Gan et al.W.T. Gan, Y. Qiu, and S. Takeda (2014)"The Regularized Siegel–Weil Formula (The Second Term Identity) and the Rallis Inner Product Formula," Inventiones Math. 198, 739–831 term the Rallis program on the theta correspondence has found wide applications. Rallis then adapted the classical idea of doubling a quadratic space to create the "Piatetski–Shapiro and Rallis Doubling Method" for constructing integral representations of L-functions, and thus they obtained the first general result on L-functions for all classical groups.J. Cogdell, H. Jacquet, D. Jiang, S. Kudla, (2015), eds. "Steve Rallis (1942–2012)," Journal of Number Theory, 146, 1–3 The 1990 Wolf Prize to Piatetski–Shapiro O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Ilya Piatetski–Shapiro", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews cites this work with Rallis as one of Piatetski–Shapiro's main achievements. Whereas it had previously been assumed that all the L-functions constructed by the Rankin–Selberg integral method were a subset of those constructed by the Langlands–Shahidi method, the 1992 paper by Rallis with Piatetski-Shapiro and Schiffmann on the Rankin–Selberg integrals for the group G_2 showed this was not the case and opened the way for determining many new examples of L-functions represented by Rankin–Selberg integrals.D. Bump (2005) "The Rankin–Selberg method: an introduction and survey" in Automorphic Representations, L-Functions and Applications: Progress and Prospects: Proceedings of a Conference honoring Steve Rallis on the occasion of his 60th birthday, de Gruyter, Berlin (Ohio State University Research Institute Publications 11), ,
The L-functions studied by Rallis are important because of their connections with the Langlands functoriality conjecture. Rallis with David Soudry and David Ginzburg wrote a series of papers culminating in their book "The descent map from automorphic representations of GL(n) to classical groups". Their automorphic descent method constructs an explicit inverse map to the (standard) Langlands functorial lift and has had major applications to the analysis of functoriality.J. Cogdell, H. Jacquet, D. Jiang, S. Kudla, (2015), eds. "Steve Rallis (1942–2012)," Journal of Number Theory, 146, 1–3 Also, using the "Rallis tower property" W.T. Gan, Y. Qiu, and S. Takeda (2014)"The Regularized Siegel–Weil Formula (The Second Term Identity) and the Rallis Inner Product Formula," Inventiones Math. 198, 739–831 from his 1984 paper on the Howe duality conjecture, Rallis with Ginzburg and Soudry studied global exceptional correspondences and found new examples of functorial lifts.
In 1990, Rallis gave an invited address on his work "Poles of Standard L-functions" at the 1990 International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyoto.S. Rallis "Poles of standard L functions," Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians (Kyoto, 1990), Vol. I, II (1991), 833–845, Math. Soc. Japan, Tokyo. In 2003, the conference "Automorphic Representations, L-Functions and Applications: Progress and Prospects" was held in honor of Rallis's 60th birthday J. Cogdell et al., eds. (2005) Automorphic Representations, L-Functions and Applications: Progress and Prospects: Proceedings of a Conference honoring Steve Rallis on the occasion of his 60th birthday, de Gruyter, Berlin (Ohio State University Research Institute Publications 11), , and according to the conference proceedings, "reflects the depth and breadth of Rallis's influence". In January, 2015, the Journal of Number Theory published a special issue in honor of Steve Rallis's contributions to mathematics.J. Cogdell, H. Jacquet, D. Jiang, S. Kudla, (2015), eds. "Steve Rallis (1942–2012)," Journal of Number Theory, 146, 1–3 Rallis has the distinction of having his biography included in the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F. "Stephen James Rallis," MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St. Andrews (http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies)
In a series of papers between 2004 and 2009, David Ginzburg, Dihua Jiang, and Stephen Rallis proved one direction of the global Gan–Gross–Prasad conjecture.
Rallis's ideas had a significant and lasting impact on the theory of automorphic forms.J. Cogdell and D. Jiang, coordinating eds., "Remembering Steve Rallis," Notices of the AMS 60 (2013), issue 4, 466–469 His mathematical life was characterized by several long term collaborations with several mathematicians including Stephen Kudla, Herve Jacquet, and Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro.
Selected publications
Articles Langlands’ functoriality and the Weil representation. Amer.J.Math. 104 (1982), no. 3, 469–515. On the Howe duality conjecture. Compositio Math. 51 (1984), no.3, 333–399. with Stephen Kudla: On the Weil–Siegel formula. J. Reine Angew. Math. 387 (1988), no. 1, 1–68. with Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro: A new way to get Euler products. J.Reine Angew. Math. 392 (1988), 110–124. with Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro and Gerard Schiffmann: Rankin–Selberg integrals for the group G_2. Amer. J. Math. 114 (1992), no.6, 1269–1315. with Stephen Kudla: A regularized Siegel–Weil formula: the first term identity. Ann. Of Math. (2) 140 (1994), no. 1, 1–80. with Herve Jacquet: Uniqueness of linear periods. Compositio Math. 387 (1996), no. 1, 65–123. with David Ginzburg and David Soudry: A tower of theta correspondences for G_2. Duke Math. J. 88 (1997), no. 3, 537–624. with David Ginzburg and David Soudry: On explicit lifts of cusp forms from GL(m) to classical groups. Annals of Mathematics (2) 150 (1999), no. 3, 807–866. with Erez Lapid: On the nonnegativity of L(1/2,pi) for SO_2(n + 1). Ann. of Math.(2) 157 (2003), no. 3, 891–917. with Avraham Aizenbud, Dmitry Gourevitch and Gerard Schiffmann: Multiplicity one theorems. Annals of Mathematics (2) 172 (2010), no. 2, 1407–1434.
Books
with Stephen Gelbart and Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro: with David Ginzburg and David Soudry:
Sources and further reading
References