Get the latest tech news
Monumental proof settles geometric Langlands conjecture
In work that has been 30 years in the making, mathematicians have proved a major part of a profound mathematical vision called the Langlands program.
For instance, a proof of the number theory Langlands correspondence for a comparatively small collection of functions in the 1990s enabled Andrew Wiles and Richard Taylor to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, which for three centuries had been one of the most famous open questions in mathematics. Then in the 1980s, Vladimir Drinfeld, now at the University of Chicago, realized that it might be possible to create a geometric Langlands correspondence by replacing eigenfunctions with more complicated objects called eigensheaves — even though at the time, he only knew how to construct a few of these. A host of further challenges await mathematicians — exploring the connection to quantum physics more deeply, extending the result to Riemann surfaces with punctures, and figuring out the implications for the other columns of the Rosetta stone.
Or read this on Hacker News