A pleasant exercise

Abstract

In the Proceedings of the AMS Boulder conference in 1965 Langlands states a combinatorial lemma involving families of characteristic functions attached to ordered partitions of an obtuse basis in a finite dimensional euclidean vector space. Langlands does not give any indication about the proof of the lemma which is said to be a "pleasant exercise". Since we did not find a proof in the literature we decided to give one. We believe it of some interest for the history of the subject.