This blog is now midway through its silent transition mode (in which the author is very busy, and will probably en up somewhere interesting, but cold and very cloudy).
Some items spotted recently:
- Vincent Lafforgue, a younger brother of Fields Medalist Laurent Lafforgue, has apparently proved a substantial part of the original Langlands conjectures, encompassing some of his brother’s results! This has been the subject of three lectures at IHÉS, and Gaitsgory has talked about it at Harvard. Vincent Lafforgue was already famous for his work on the Baum-Connes conjecture (the things he did more than a decade ago had earned him an EMS prize in 2000 — see this Bourbaki seminar — and more recently a second Bourbaki seminar was devoted to some of his new work on that topic).
- The prize season is in full swing, but it’s still difficult to predict who will win a Fields medal next summer (some of the names in my earlier list have come up recently, but with other names too) :
- The 2014 Fermat prize, which is a good indicator of Fields Medal potential for those recipients under 40, went to Camillo De Lellis (new name) and Martin Hairer. Since Manjul Bhargava had won it in 2011, that’s already three strong candidates…
- …to which one should add Alexei Borodin, Ben Green and Maryam Mirzakhani (all three will be plenary speakers under 40 in Seoul, together with Bhargava), and also Assaf Naor who gave the three 2013 Minerva Lectures at Princeton, and Jacob Lurie whose work will be featured at a forthcoming MSRI program.
- And among candidates who will still be eligible in 2018, Artur Avila was plenary speaker at the inaugural Mathematical Congress of the Americas, Simon Brendle won the 2014 Bôcher Memorial Prize, while Sophie Morel won the 2014 AWM-Microsoft Prize, and Peter Scholze won the 2013 Sastra Ramanujan Prize (and his work will be the subject of a Hot Topics Workshop at MSRI next year). And I’ve probably missed some other candidates.
- The 2014 Morgan prize for undergraduate students went to Eric Larson from Harvard, yet another stellar young researcher who attended several REUs.
- In France, the 2014 Cours Peccot (see my earlier list) will be given by Nicolas Rougerie
Back to silent mode for now…
episodic thoughts 