The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has awarded the 2018 Abel Prize to Professor Robert P. Langlands, Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton University, ‘for his visionary program connecting representation theory to number theory’. Professor Langlands will receive his award from His Majesty King Harald V at the University Aula, Oslo, Norway on 22nd May 2018. The Abel Prize carries a cash award of 6 million NOK (about 623,000 Euro)
Langlands' insights were so radical and so rich that the mechanisms he suggested to bridge these mathematical fields led to a project named the Langlands program. The program has enlisted hundreds of the world's best mathematicians over the last fifty years. Few other projects in modern mathematics have as wide a scope, have produced so many deep results, and have so many people working on it. Its depth and breadth have grown and the Langlands program has been described as a grand unified theory of mathematics.
Professor Langlands was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1981 and was awarded Honorary Membership of the London Mathematical Society (LMS) in 2015, the Society’s 150th Anniversary Year.
Professor Caroline Series, LMS President, will be giving a speech at the Abel Banquet in Professor Langland’s honour. She commented; ‘The Abel prize, one of the highest honours in mathematics, is justly awarded to Professor Langlands for his pioneering insights which have transformed number theory and representation theory. One example of the Langlands correspondence is the modularity theorem which formed the basis of Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s last theorem’.
More information about the Abel Prize is available here