This book offers a systematic treatment--the first in book form--of the development and use of cohomological induction to construct unitary representations. George Mackey introduced induction in 1950 as a real analysis construction for passing from a unitary representation of a closed subgroup of a locally compact group to a unitary representation of the whole group. Later a parallel construction using complex analysis and its associated co-homology theories grew up as a result of work by Borel, Weil, Harish-Chandra, Bott, Langlands, Kostant, and Schmid. Cohomological induction, introduced...

This book is an expanded version of the Hermann Weyl Lectures given at the Institute for Advanced Study in January 1986. It outlines some of what is now known about irreducible unitary representations of real reductive groups, providing fairly complete definitions and references, and sketches (at least) of most proofs.

The first half of the book is devoted to the three more or less understood constructions of such representations: parabolic induction, complementary series, and cohomological parabolic induction. This culminates in the description of all irreducible unitary...