Title: L-groups and the Langlands program for covering groups: a historical introduction,
Abstract: In this joint introduction to an Asterisque volume, we give a short
discussion of the historical developments in the study of nonlinear covering
groups, touching on their structure theory, representation theory and the
theory of automorphic forms. This serves as a historical motivation and sets
the scene for the papers in the volume. Our discussion is necessarily
subjective and will undoubtedly leave out the contributions of many authors, to
whom we apologize in earnest.