Laurent Lafforgue

Laurent Lafforgue
Born (1966-11-06) 6 November 1966
Antony, Hauts-de-Seine, France
Nationality French
Alma mater École Normale Supérieure
Université de Paris-Sud
Known for Proof of Langlands conjectures
Awards Clay Research Award (2000)
Fields Medal (2002)
Scientific career
Fields Mathematics
Institutions CNRS
Thesis D-stukas de Drinfeld (1994)
Doctoral advisor Gérard Laumon

Laurent Lafforgue (French: [lafɔʁɡ]; born 6 November 1966) is a French mathematician. He has made outstanding contributions to Langlands' program in the fields of number theory and analysis,[1] and in particular proved the Langlands conjectures for the automorphism group of a function field. The crucial contribution by Lafforgue to solve this question is the construction of compactifications of certain moduli stacks of shtukas. The monumental proof is the result of more than six years of concentrated efforts.

In 2002 at the 24th International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing, China, he received the Fields Medal together with Vladimir Voevodsky.[2]

Biography

Laurent Lafforgue has two brothers, Thomas and Vincent, both mathematicians. The two brothers are now a teacher in a classe préparatoire aux grandes écoles at Lycée Louis le Grand in Paris and a CNRS researcher at the Institute Fourier in Grenoble, respectively.

He won 2 silver medals at International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in 1984 and 1985. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1986. In 1994 he received his Ph.D. under the direction of Gérard Laumon in the Arithmetic and Algebraic Geometry team at the Université de Paris-Sud. Currently he is a research director of CNRS, detached as permanent professor of mathematics at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (I.H.E.S.) in Bures-sur-Yvette, France.

Career

He received the Clay Research Award in 2000, and the Grand Prix Jacques Herbrand of the French Academy of Sciences in 2001. His younger brother Vincent Lafforgue is also a notable mathematician. On 22 May 2011 Lafforgue was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Notre Dame.[3]

Views

Lafforgue is a critic of what he calls the "pedagogically correct" in France's educational system. In 2005, he was forced to resign from the Haut conseil de l'éducation after he expressed these views in a private letter that he sent to Bruno Racine, president of the HCE, that later was made public.[4]

Works

  • Lafforgue, L. Chtoucas de Drinfeld et applications. [Drinfeld shtukas and applications]. Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, Vol. II (Berlin, 1998). Doc. Math.1998, Extra Vol. II, 563–570
  • [Lafforgue, L. Chtoucas de Drinfeld, formule des traces d'Arthur-Selberg et correspondance de Langlands.] error: {{lang}}: text has italic markup (help) [Drinfeld shtukas, Arthur-Selberg trace formula and Langlands correspondence]. Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, Vol. I (Beijing, 2002), 383–400, Higher Ed. Press, Beijing, 2002. "arXiv preprint math/0212399" (PDF).

Notes

  1. ↑ D Mackenzie (2000) Fermat's Last Theorem's First Cousin, Science 287(5454), 792-793.
  2. ↑ Friedlander, Eric M.; Rapoport, Michael; Suslin, Andrei (2003). "The mathematical work of the 2002 Fields medalists" (PDF). Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 50 (2): 212–217.
  3. ↑ University of Notre Dame. "Honorary Degree". Archived from the original on 13 August 2011. Retrieved 20 June 2011.
  4. ↑ "« Démission » forcée de Laurent Lafforgue, mathématicien français, du Haut Conseil de l'Education (HCE)", Polémia (in French), December 10, 2005 .

References

  • Official home page (in French)
  • O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Laurent Lafforgue", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews .
  • Laurent Lafforgue at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  • "Laurent Lafforgue's results". International Mathematical Olympiad.
  • Lafforgue and education in France L’Affaire Lafforgue (in Portuguese)
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