Abstract: In the 1980's Bernstein-Zelevinski calculated the centre of the abelian category of smooth representations on $GL_{n}K$ when $K$ is a local field. Soon after Deligne generalised this to all reductive algebraic groups $G$ over $K$. The centre of a category consists of all families $z_{A} \in End(A)$ as $A$ varies through all objects such that for any morphism in the category $f:A \longrightarrow B$ we have $fz_{A} = z_{B}f$. Deligne's answer comes in terms of distributions on $G$.

Over the last decade or so, I developed the notion of monomial resolutions for such representations. This amounts to an embedding of the representation category into a derived category of monomial objects. Using Bruhat's thesis I shall explain how to interpret the monomial morphisms in terms of spaces of distributions and thereby to re-derive Deligne's result.

I know to my cost how technical this stuff can get - so I shall try to navigate by means of conceptual insights. For example, for us topologists, I shall explain how sheaves of distributions behave in a manner precisely analogous to a famous result of Swan and Serre about sections of topological vector bundles.