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Robert Langlands
Summary
Robert Phelan Langlands, (ˈlæŋləndz; born October 6, 1936) is a Canadian mathematician. He is best known as the founder of the Langlands program, a vast web of conjectures and results connecting representation theory and automorphic forms to the study of Galois groups in number theory, for which he received the 2018 Abel Prize. He was an emeritus professor and occupied Albert Einstein's office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, until 2020 when he retired.
Langlands was born in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada, in 1936 to Robert Langlands and Kathleen J Phelan. He has two younger sisters (Mary b 1938; Sally b 1941). In 1945, his family moved to White Rock, near the US border, where his parents had a building supply and construction business.
He graduated from Semiahmoo Secondary School and started enrolling at the University of British Columbia at the age of 16, receiving his undergraduate degree in Mathematics in 1957; he continued at UBC to receive an M. Sc. in 1958. He then went to Yale University where he received a PhD in 1960.
His first academic position was at Princeton University from 1960 to 1967, where he worked as an associate professor. He spent a year in Turkey at METU during 1967–68 in an office next to Cahit Arf's. He was a Miller Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley from 1964 to 1965, then was a professor at Yale University from 1967 to 1972. He was appointed Hermann Weyl Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1972, and became professor emeritus in January 2007.
Langlands' Ph.D. thesis was on the analytical theory of Lie semigroups, but he soon moved into representation theory, adapting the methods of Harish-Chandra to the theory of automorphic forms. His first accomplishment in this field was a formula for the dimension of certain spaces of automorphic forms, in which particular types of Harish-Chandra's discrete series appeared.
He next constructed an analytical theory of Eisenstein series for reductive groups of rank greater than one, thus extending work of Hans Maass, Walter Roelcke, and Atle Selberg from the early 1950s for rank one groups such as .
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