Freedom is a powerful incentive to do the best we can. As I can attest from examples in my own work, it sometimes leads to dead ends, but that is a small price to pay.
On November 14, the Institute for Advanced Study announced
the appointment of Robbert Dijkgraaf as its ninth Director,
succeeding, as of July 1, 2012, Peter Goddard, who has served as
Director since January 2004.
The fundamental lemma has been described as a gross understatement. Says Andrew Wiles, a Visitor in the School of Mathematics and an Institute Trustee, “At first, it was thought to be a minor irritant, but it subsequently became clear that it was not a lemma but rather a central problem in the field.”
It has been said that the goals of modern mathematics are
reconstruction and development.1 The unifying conjectures between
number theory and representation theory that Robert Langlands,
Professor Emeritus in the School of Mathematics, articulated...
Born on October 6, 1936, in British Columbia, Robert Langlands
grew up in a small town where his father owned a building supply
store. “When I was a child I liked to add and subtract,” says
Langlands. “In our store, my mother worked. And I remember...
