Lectures on automorphic L-functions

This book provides a comprehensive account of how automorphic L-functions play a crucial role in the Langlands program, especially, the Langlands functoriality conjecture, and in number theory. Recently there has been a major development in the Langlands functoriality conjecture by the use of automorphic L-functions, namely, by combining converse theorems of Cogdell and Piatetski-Shapiro with the Langlands-Shahidi method. This book introduces the reader to these developments step by step, and explains how the Langlands functoriality conjecture implies solutions to several outstanding conjectur