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I have been reading a number of papers by Jacques Tits (mostly written in the second half of 1980s) and in them he frequently refers to following publications of his:

  1. Résumé de cours, Annuaire du collège de France, 81e année (1980-1981), 75-86.
  2. Résumé de cours, Annuaire du collège de France, 82e année (1981-1982), 91-105.

Unfortunately I have not been able to locate these two papers (internet, library, faculty). Any help with finding these two would be immensely appreciated.

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I've randomly acquired from Tits just a few of his resumes: 1979-80 (Bruhat-Tits work), 1980-81 (Kac-Moody algebras and groups), 1990-91 (Galois cohomology of semisimple groups over global fields). These are all quite short and not likely to add too much to related published papers, but if other means fail I could copy the 1980-81 resume and mail it from UMass if you supply a precise mailing address. (See my home page for contact information.)

One option is to write directly to the College de France requesting copies. Tits himself has long been retired and is not in good health, but the staff at the College might be helpful. As far as I know the resumes do not circulate through libraries and the like. The College is an ancient institution but has adapted to the Internet age: links.

ADDED: Digging further into my file, I also found a preliminary draft of the 1981-82 resume. I don't know whether any changes were made in the printed version.

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    $\begingroup$ It would be über nice if someone who has copies of this could scan them and post them to the arXiv, for example. $\endgroup$ Mar 18, 2011 at 22:55
  • $\begingroup$ @Mariano: There may of course be a copyright question here, as well as the question of whether Tits himself would approve. The individual resumes by professors are part of the annual College report, which can in principle be purchased but is not in the public domain. To complicate matters, they began posting resumes on their website some years ago. Fortunately I have no experience at all with scanning technology and leave the issue for others to debate. $\endgroup$ Mar 19, 2011 at 0:15
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The "résumés de cours" of Tits are now published by the SMF, see here.

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It's indeed a real pity that so many of Tits's papers are quite difficult to get. Luckily, there are some very concrete ideas by F. Buekenhout, B. Muehlherr, J.-P. Tignol and H. Van Maldeghem, to publish a "Collected works of Jacques Tits" volume (I think it will be published by the EMS, but don't take my word for it).

I know that they started at least 3 years ago with acquiring the papers and writing to publishers about copyright issues and such, but unfortunately I don't really know what the current status of their project is.

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    $\begingroup$ It's definitely worthwhile but tricky to get collected works published, since so many items are already online and in some libraries (many also under copyright). Papers with comments added by authors are especially desirable but not so easy to manage. Anyway, the yearly reports of the College de France are in a fuzzy area of publication, somewhat like the (more formally published) Bourbaki seminar talks. So there is also the tricky issue of what to include in a collection. $\endgroup$ Mar 21, 2011 at 22:13
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    $\begingroup$ The œuvres have been published: EMS, MSN. $\endgroup$
    – LSpice
    Jan 2, 2018 at 17:11
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If you can read legacy books, check out:

http://www.le-livre.com/fiche-ROD0024475.html

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