Princeton Township resident, Robert P. Langlands, the Hermann Weyl Professor of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, has been awarded the $150,000 Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize in Mathematics. The award, from Northwestern University, is given for major contributions to new knowledge or for the development of significant new modes of analysis. It recognizes Professor Langlands's "fundamental vision connecting representation theory, automorphic forms and number theory."
Among the world's leading mathematicians, Professor Langlands's groundbreaking work has provided a whole generation of mathematicians with fertile fields for their own research. In 1967 — in a now-legendary letter sent to fellow-mathematician André Weil — Langlands launched what became known as the "Langlands Program," a series of conjectures suggesting that the mathematics of algebra and the mathematics of analysis are intimately related; he posited relations among seemingly unrelated concepts in number theory, algebraic geometry, and the theory of automorphic forms.
The letter's 17 hand-written pages outlined "the Langlands conjectures." These quickly spread among the mathematics community providing a road map for a generation of mathematicians to follow.
Born in British Columbia, Canada in 1936, Robert Langlands graduated from the University of British Columbia with a BA in 1957 and an M.Sc. in 1958. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1960 and subsequently taught at Princeton University from 1960 until 1967 and then at Yale University from 1967 until 1972 when he joined the permanent faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study.
In an address made at the University of Toronto in 1993, he said: "Most mathematical issues are, in spite of the efforts of our great predecessors, in large part unresolved. Although not so chaotic or undisciplined as the world around us, mathematics does reveal itself in shapes and patterns that, like those of light and sound, can never be seized once and for all. To impose order on them requires heroic efforts. … Mathematics is an art that moves slowly. If we are lucky, we can still contribute to questions that have occupied generations."
At the Institute for Advanced Study, where he occupies the office once used by Albert Einstein, Professor Langlands has conducted series of lectures on "The Practice of Mathematics." Of these lectures, he has written: "There are several central mathematical problems, or complexes of problems that every mathematician who is eager to acquire some broad competence in the subject would like to understand. Those with the most intellectual and aesthetic appeal to me are in number theory, classical applied mathematics and mathematical physics. In spite of forty years as a mathematician, I have difficulty describing these problems, even to myself, in a simple, cogent and concise manner that makes it clear what is wanted and why."
This is far from the first time that Professor Langlands has been honored for intellectual achievement. In 1988, he was the first to receive the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics from American Mathematical Society. He shared the 1995-96 Wolf Prize in Mathematics with Princeton University professor Andrew Wiles (famous for his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem), and, last year, the American Mathematical Society awarded him the 2005 Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research.
He has also garnered a series of top honors including, in 2000, the Grande Médaille d'Or (Gold Medal) of the Paris Academy of Sciences, the highest honor presented by the Academy. He is a Member of the Royal Society, Royal Society of Canada, American Mathematical Society, and the Canadian Mathematical Society.
The Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize is one of two $150,000 awards from Northwestern University. A second award, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics, was given to Lars Peter Hansen of the University of Chicago. Langlands and Hansen will deliver public lectures and participate in other scholarly activities at Northwestern during the fall of 2007.