A Special Issue in Honor of Professor Freydoon Shahidi on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday

This special issue of the Bulletin of the Iranian Mathematical Society celebrates the 70th birthday of Freydoon Shahidi. Shahidi was born in Tehran on June 19, 1947. He received a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Tehran in 1969. After serving in the Iranian Army Corps of Engineers, he enrolled as a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, US, after his interests switched from engineering to mathematics. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Johns Hopkins in 1975, writing a thesis “On Gauss sums attached to the pairs and exterior powers of the representation of general linear groups over finite and local fields” under the direction of Joe Shalika. Shalika was a pioneer in the theory of automorphic forms and their L-functions and Shahidi followed in his footsteps. After a year at the Institute in Princeton, where Shahidi was greatly influenced by Robert Langlands, and a year at Indiana University, Shahidi settled in at Purdue University, where he has stayed throughout his career. He is now a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics there. Among the honors he has earned along the way include being elected as an Honorary Member of the Iranian Mathematical Society, a Fellow of the American Mathema