Navegar

09/08/2018

Demystifying Langlands programs with sea serpents

French mathematician Vincent Lafforgue presented ‘Global Langlands parametrization and shtukas for reductive groups’ during an ICM 2018 plenary session.  The researcher has led mathematics research as Director of CNRS, at Université d’Orléans for the past eight years.  This was the second time that Lafforgue presented  at ICM, having previously presented at the International Congress of Mathematics in 2002, in China.

The plenary opened with an image of a sea serpent, used to represent the Langlands program to this morning’s audience of international mathematicians.  Lafforgue described his field as a one with many “deep and mysterious conjectures”.  Exploring algebraic variety of dimension 1 and nonsingular additive points was contextualized through the Frenchman’s analysis of conformal field theory. 

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“I am very grateful to CNRS. Landlands program is far from my first mathematical subject and I would never have been able to devote myself to it without the great freedom given by CNRS to researchers to accomplish their work” said Lafforgue in his acknowledgements. Lafforgue was awarded the 2000 European Mathematical Society Prize for his work in the fields of K-theory of operator algebras. He aspires to continue his research in Langlands programs at CNRS.