James Cogdell


James Wesley Cogdell is an American mathematician.

Education and career

He graduated from Yale University in 1977 with a bachelor's degree and in 1981 with a Ph.D. His doctoral dissertation Arithmetic Quotients of the Complex 2-Ball and Modular Forms of Nebentypus was supervised by Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro. Cogdell was a postdoc at the University of Maryland and the University of California, Los Angeles. He was from 1982 to 1988 an assistant professor at Rutgers University. At Oklahoma State University he was from 1987 to 1988 assistant professor, from 1988 to 1994 an associate professor, and from 1994 to 2004 a full professor. In 2004 he became a professor at Ohio State University.
In autumn 1983 and for the academic year 1999–2000 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. He has held visiting positions at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, at the University of Iowa, at Fields Institute, and at the Erwin Schrödinger International Institute for Mathematical Physics.
Cogdell works on L-functions, automorphic forms, and analytic number theory. In collaboration with Piatetski-Shapiro, he proved converse theorems for L-functions for the general linear groups. The goal is to characterize the L-functions that originate from automorphic forms. For this was solved by Hervé Jacquet and Robert Langlands and for by Jacquet, Piatetski-Shapiro and Joseph Shalika. The problem goes back to Erich Hecke's characterization of the Dirichlet series that come from modular forms.
In 2002 Cogdell was, with Piatetski-Shapiro, an Invited Speaker with talk Converse theorems, functoriality and applications to number theory at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing. He was an editor, with Simon Gindikin and Peter Sarnak, for Selected Works of Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro.
Cogdell was elected in 2012 a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and in 2016 a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Selected publications