Abel Prize for Langlands' Unified Theory

摘要

Robert P. Langlands is the 2018 recipient of the Abel Prize, an honour sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize of mathematics. The citation recognises the profound impact of 'his visionary program connecting representation theory to number theory', a program that Langlands launched in 1967 as a 30-year-old associate professor at Princeton University. Given the far-reaching web of interconnections implied by the Langlands program, Edward Frenkel calls it a 'Grand Unified Theory of mathematics'. In its original formulation, the program sought a correspondence between Galois representations, these being objects arising from number theory, and automorphic L-functions, objects created by Langlands and inspired by harmonic analysis.