#langlands

The Frenkel book is really interesting, but also...

What’s the book called?

Love & Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality, by Edward Frenkel.

It’s a combination of Frenkel’s autobiography, charting how he started out as a Jew in an extremely anti-semitic Soviet Union, and eventually became an extremely successful mathematician, charting his career and the topics he worked on.  Tied into this is an explanation of the math he’s worked on, and the Langlands program more generally.

I think the book is more or less a failure at its stated primary goal, which is to make the beauty of math accessible to people with no exposure to math.  Frenkel said he’s trying to not use any jargon, and to keep everything at a level comprehensible to people with no background.  I believe him that he’s trying; I don’t believe that he’s succeeding.  

(In the first ninety pages he’s defined generating functions, modular forms, groups, group representations, the fundamental group of a Riemann surface, and the Galois groups of number fields and function fields on curves).

I’m finding it annoying at points, because it sometimes gets a bit preachy and self-satisfied about the extremely deep beauty of mathematics and the amazing aesthetic experience and how it connects us to a deeper reality.  It’s an excellent version of that, though; I’m saving a bunch of quotes to be “representations of how many mathematicians think about this stuff”.

But he also has a bunch of amusing anecdotes and a bunch of really good lines.  

Writing papers was the punishment we had to endure for the thrill of discovering new mathematics.

“I cannot send you with every issue [of this journal] so you would explain to each subscriber what this result was good for, now can I?  This has to be written clearly in the paper, OK?”

While in prison, Weil wrote a letter to his sister....I sometimes jokes that perhaps we should jail some of the leading mathematicians to force them to express their ideas in accessible terms, the way Weil did.

And honestly, I needed a good overview of how the Langlands program fits together, and this seems to fit the bill.  (I know pieces, and I work on a fragment of it, but I never got my head around how the whole thing fits together).

This year’s TOK question for Mathematics is the following: “How can we reconcile the opposing demands for specialization and generalization in the production of knowledge? Discuss with reference to mathematics and one other area of knowledge” This is a nice chance to discuss the Langlands program which was recently covered in a really excellent Numberphile video.  image by Bjorn Oberg for Quanta…

Updated January 21, 2018 11:57:Thirteen

Photo: Graeme Langlands used to be living with dementia and Alzheimer’s in a Sydney nursing dwelling. (Supplied: NRL)

Rugby league Immortal Graeme ‘Changa’ Langlands, who used to be capped forty five cases for Australia, has died mature seventy six.

The feeble St George Dragons fullback had dementia and Alzheimer’s and…

Yesterday I met with Major Langlands at his Aitchison College residence. Born in 1917 in Yorkshire, England, he arrived in pre partition India in 1943 with the British army. After Partition he was transferred to the Pakistani army and still continues to live in Pakistan.

When I sat down with him, he had a copy of the Express Tribune magazine on a table in which he was featured on the cover. He asked me if I had read it (which I thankfully had) and then told me it sold out in Lahore because everyone who knows him tried to buy it. He seemed amused by the caption 'The blue-eyed Boy'. The online version of this article is here.

The story of the Englishman whose heart lies in Pakistan.

When the young orphan from Yorkshire decided to take charge of his life at the age of 12, he could have never imagined that his decisions would lead him to influence the lives of so many in a country that was yet to be conceived. For the young boy, the logic had been extremely simple — since people’s kindness had helped him through the darkest hours of his life, he had to return the favour. Now more than eight decades later, just shy of his centenary, Major Geoffrey Douglas Langlands is an institution rich with stories and an understanding of the people and the country he once witnessed coming to life in 1947.