Laurent Lafforgue, Mathematician
Permanent professor from 2000 to 2021
Laurent Lafforgue became a mathematician mainly through the study of the new algebraic functorial geometry that Alexander Grothendieck created at the end of the 1950s and that he developed at IHES with his collaborators and students.
Laurent Lafforgue worked mainly on the “Langlands program”, a set of very deep conjectures which, in an arithmetic framework, link harmonic analysis, Galois theory, and algebraic geometry. He demonstrated one of these conjectures: the Langlands correspondence on function bodies.
In recent years, he has returned to Grothendieck’s pioneering work by deepening his understanding of one of the theories that Grothendieck had created and that he considered particularly important: the theory of topos, through his exchanges with Olivia Caramello. Laurent Lafforgue supports the development around Olivia Caramello of a new school of topos that exploits and deepens the technique of “topos as bridges” that she introduced based on the duality of sites and topos. He was holder of the Algebraic Geometry Huawei Chair from 2019 to 2021.
Peccot Prize (1996),
CNRS Bronze Medal (1998),
Clay Research Award (2000),
Jacques Herbrand Prize (2001),
Fields Medal (2002),
Académie des Sciences de Paris member,
Honorary doctor of University of Notre Dame.
