James Greig Arthur CC FRSC FRS (born May 18, 1944)[1] is a Canadian mathematician working on automorphic forms, and former President of the American Mathematical Society.
[2] Born in Hamilton, Ontario, Arthur graduated from Upper Canada College in 1962,[3] received a BSc from the University of Toronto in 1966, and a MSc from the same institution in 1967.
He was a student of Robert Langlands; his dissertation was Analysis of Tempered Distributions on Semisimple Lie Groups of Real Rank One.
[5] Arthur is known for the Arthur–Selberg trace formula, generalizing the Selberg trace formula from the rank-one case (due to Selberg himself) to general reductive groups, one of the most important tools for research on the Langlands program.
[8] He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.