p-Adic Automorphic Forms on Shimura Varieties

In the early years of the 1980s, while I was visiting the Institute for Ad­ vanced Study (lAS) at Princeton as a postdoctoral member, I got a fascinating view, studying congruence modulo a prime among elliptic modular forms, that an automorphic L-function of a given algebraic group G should have a canon­ ical p-adic counterpart of several variables. I immediately decided to find out the reason beh...