Robert Langlands

Robert Langlands is giving a public talk at TIFR today evening. Here's a news report about the talk from today's Times of India.

• Math luminary to show old masters' modern magic.
  What Langlands does has arguably had the most profound influence on the course of number theory in the last 50 years. Thanks to Langlands' own unifying insights, two vibrant mathematical areas — representation theory of Lie groups and number theory — are now seen as intimately entwined, resulting in a burst of creative research. An outstanding example is Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Experts say one reason why this is so important is because it pushes forward the eponymous Langlands Program, which is a set of conjectures suggesting deep and surprising interconnections between arithmetic and symmetry. The programme provides a bi-numerary dictionary of sorts, translating one field into another. In 2002, the proof of another piece of the Langlands Program by the French mathematician Laurent Lafforgue won the Fields Medal, which is often called the Nobel Prize of Mathematics. Langlands is visiting the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and is to deliver a public lecture on Wednesday at the Homi Bhabha auditorium on ‘Descartes and Fermat: Reading the Ancients as Moderns'.