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Comment by throwaway81523 | Hacker News Reader

I hate blind youtube links, and this one even takes a while into the video to say what it is about. Spoiler: the Langlands Program. Video has some nice animations but not much about the math. The author has a writeup here:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-the-langlands-program...

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One of the well-known category theorists has said [0],

> I’ve never succeeded in understanding the slightest thing about it.

[0] https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2010/08/what_is_the_lan...

I'm glad Tom was so open about his lack of knowledge here, so often it is easy to assume any professional mathematician should know all this things and it all comes easy to them. However this obviously isn't the case and I doubt things will be any easier in the future as mathematics becomes more specialized.

For me it wasn't a spoiler, and also the video contained more math that I understand than the Wikipedia link (that just was a list of lots of mathematical structures that I don't know anything of, and not part of the computer science curriculum, so I don't expect other hackers to understand them either).

I guess it is fitting to mention the famous Wandsworth Constant (first 30% of the video can be skipped).

In seriousness, having had some exposure to the Langlands program (through the wonderful Love and Math by Frenkel), I was counting the minutes to hear about it.

I found the video to have a great layman explanation of what it is about.

It does say LANGLANDS on the thumbnail, as well as talk about it in the description.

It’s explaining context, not all the intricacies of the math. That being said, it does tackle a decent amount of math in that video.

Thank you for the summary!

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