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Russian mathematician praises winner of 2018 Abel Prize

Many scientists have vested their efforts into research under this program and some of them have "scored incredible achievements"
Robert Langlands wikimedia.org
Robert Langlands
© wikimedia.org

MOSCOW, March 20. /TASS/. Canadian mathematician Robert Langlands who was named winner of the Abel Prize for 2018 on Tuesday, takes credit for being ability to discern links between the areas of mathematics standing wide apart from one another and to formulate an expansive program for research, which mathematicians are implementing quite successfully, Dr. Stanislav Smirnov, a professor at Geneva University told TASS.

Dr. Langlands, 81, received the prize for creating a visionary program that connects representation theory with number theory. His brainchild embraces a broad field of research in mathematics that converges many hypotheses and theorems from the key sections of the science.

"Robert Langlands proposed in his time [from 1967 through 1970] a totally unexpected set of connections between the two very different areas of mathematics - number theory and geometry," Dr. Smirnov said. "Probably the most interesting thing is the scientist singled out connections between very distant areas and formulated well-specified objectives for what was to be done."

Many scientists have vested their efforts into research under this program and some of them have "scored incredible achievements". "Langlands’s hypotheses proved to be correct."

According to Dr. Smirnov, the implementation of Langlands’s program is still in progress. "Its parallel versions have appeared and researchers are working on them."

Dr. Sergei Kislyakov, the director of the Vladimir Steklov Mathematical Institute in St Petersburg said Dr. Langlands’s harmonic program of research did not have an immediate practical application, "but in mathematics, you have to wait for some time - in many cases, for quite a long time."

"Some positions [in Langlands’s program] have been resolved, while others are still awaiting resolution," he said. "This is a very significant layer in contemporary mathematics, a very subtle and very important branch of science.".