Sixth Abel Conference: A Mathematical Celebration of Robert P. Langlands

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters named Robert P. Langlands the 2018 recipient of the Abel Prize "for his visionary program connecting representation theory to number theory." This workshop will both celebrate the mathematical achievements of the honoree and discuss the thriving and broad landscape of modern mathematics still grappling with the many incarnations of Langlands’ functoriality conjectures.

These functoriality conjectures predict deep relationships among representations on different groups. They may be viewed as a vast non-abelian generalization of class field theory, the crowning achievement of algebraic number theory in the first part of the 20th century, that concerns problems related to abelian Galois groups. Langlands’s program seeks to connect automorphic representations on reductive groups (fundamental analytic information) to Galois representations on a suitably defined dual group (fundamental arithmetic information).

Langlands is Professor Emeritus in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study. His numerous awards include the 1996 Wolf Prize (with Andrew Wiles), the 2005 American Mathematical Society Steele Prize, the 2006 Nemmers Prize in Mathematics, and the 2007 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences (with Richard Taylor).

Read more about Langlands’s work and biography.