Robert Langlands, Mathematical Visionary, Wins the Abel Prize

quantamagazine.org

117 points·portofcall··7 comments

G.C. Rota, on being assigned to help check the problems of Linear Operators for Dunford and Schwartz as a graduate student at Yale (while it was still a manuscript), but finding himself unable to solve one of the problems:

After a few hours, feeling somewhat downcast, we all got up and left. The next morning I met Jack, who patted me on the back and told me, "Don't worry, I could not do it either." I did not hear about Problem Twenty of Section Nine for another three years. A first-year graduate student had taken Dunford's course in linear operators. Dunford had assigned him the problem, the student had solved it, and developed an elegant theory around it. His name is Robert Langlands.

(From Indiscrete Thoughts, p. 37.)

"Indiscrete Thoughts" is terrific, and there is a lot of gold in its pages.

Of possible interest to those who work in artificial intelligence/machine learning is Chapter IV "The Barrier of Meaning", where Rota records Stanislaw Ulam's thoughts on the matter.

Note also that there is a similar volume entitled "Discrete Thoughts".

He deserves it! A great thinker! Here's a series of lectures he gave outlining some great fundamentals of his view on mathematics ( with very little prerequsites ). - https://video.ias.edu/The-Practice-of-Mathematics

For those who prefer reading to watching videos, there are also excellent transcripts in the PDF format.

This should be the link http://www.math.ias.edu/practice

And here's his original letter to Weil.

https://publications.ias.edu/rpl/paper/43

What lang did he use to write his program?

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