E-Paper
Facts & figures: Maths wizard in town tomorrow
WORLD RENOWNED mathematician Prof Robert Langlands will deliver a lecture under HRI-Triveni Lecture series on Wednesday at Harish-Chandra Research Institute (HRI) here. He will speak on ?Relfections on the legacy of Harish-Chandra?.
WORLD RENOWNED mathematician Prof Robert Langlands will deliver a lecture under HRI-Triveni Lecture series on Wednesday at Harish-Chandra Research Institute (HRI) here. He will speak on ‘Relfections on the legacy of Harish-Chandra’.
HRI is a premier research institute in the country focusing on fundamental problems of mathematics and physics.
Harish Chandra (1923-1983) was one of the outstanding mathematicians of the last century. He was born in Kanpur and educated in Allahabad. He worked with Homi Bhabha in Bangalore and with Paul Dirac in Cambridge. After his doctorate, he switched from Physics to Mathematics and made fundamental contributions to the representation theory of reductive groups.
Prof Langlands, a close friend and long-time colleague of Harish Chandra, is one of the most distinguished mathematicians of the all time. He was born in New Westminster, British Columbia, in 1936. He studied at the University of British Columbia and at Yale University. He has held faculty positions at Frincston University and Yale University, and is currently the Hermann Weyl Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
In 1987, Prof Langlands revolutioned class field theory. A large number of mathematicians all over the world are busy working on his programme relating Galois representations to automorphic representations. Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermal’s Last Theorem can be counted among the successes of the Langlands programme. Significantly, the work of Prof Langlands himself plays a crucial role in Wiles’ proof.
Langlands’ programme was carried out for local function fields by Laumon, Rapaport and Stuhier, for local number fields by Harris, Taylor and Henniart, and for global function fields by Drinfeld and Lafforgue. The last two received Fields Medals, the highest award in mathematics, for their work.
Prof Langlands has won several awards in recognition of his outstanding contribution to mathematics.
