Preface

Abstract

Together with Francis Buekenhout and Jean-Pierre Tignol we have edited the Collected Works of Jacques Tits, whose four volumes were published in 2013 by the European Mathematical Society in the series Heritage of European Mathematics. Not all of Tits' papers were included in the Collected Works for reasons explained there in the Notes by the editors.

During the preparation of the Collected Works we assembled an almost complete collection of Tits' writings. In view of the huge impact of Tits' work we felt it desirable to make the remaining works available to the mathematical community. We thus decided to put the material that was not included in the Collected Works in the present special volume of Innovations in Incidence Geometry.

We are grateful to Jacques Tits for agreeing to this project. We had the support of several people and institutions. We would like to thank our co-editors Francis Buekenhout and Jean-Pierre Tignol since this supplement profited a lot from the work that was done before, during the preparation of the Collected Works. Special thanks go to Bertrand Rémy and Jean-Pierre Serre. We are also grateful to Franz Bingen, Pierre De la Harpe, Narasimha Sastry, Jef Thas, Guy Valette and Stefan Witzel for supporting us in various ways. Anneleen De Schepper and Beukje Temmermans did a great job helping prepare the scans for publication. Finally we would like to thank the Département des manuscrits et des archives privés de la Bibliothèque de Genève, the Service de documentation de Lyon 1 and the Réseau des bibliothèques de maths en France for their support.

March 2018