Oh, Robert Langlands! I worked on a short film about him, for the Abel Prize ceremony, last March. http://www.abelprize.no/artikkel/vis.html?tid=73176
What is the background music you used for this video? Thanks
Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?
51–60 of 78 posts
Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is completely at odds with my experience of speaking French in France, both in major cities and small villages. My spoken French is appalling, and yet I've encountered nothing but good will from the French, happy to encourage me, and to work together to figure out what I'm trying to say. Obviously YMMV, but your assertions are contrary to my experience. Edit: Down-voted. Thanks for the reality check. 2nd edit: U…
There's sort of an uncanny valley sort of situation, in my experience (as an anglophone canadian with the french of a 3-4 year old): If you're clearly a foreign visitor, and you're speaking bad french, it's often appreciated and maybe found slightly charming. But once you get to the point where your french is reasonably good, but you have an obvious accent, then (some) people (might, sometimes) be more inclined to be…
Precisely. If you try a few tourist phrases, or very basic French, it will be mildly appreciated. But if you speak fluent French with a bit of an accent, particularly in the big cities, you'll frequently be met with arrogance and attempts to switch to English, even if your French is far better than your interlocutor's.
That said, in small towns and villages, this doesn't happen as much. Seems to mainly be a phenomenon in Paris and other large cities.
Also, in Quebec this is never an issue. As long as you speak fluently, Quebecois are happy to speak with you in French.
Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?
#53E. Frenkel who was also mentioned in the article (as being in a kind of opposition to Langlands), is an interesting figure in his own right. His own account on his career in mathematics is fascinating.
I took linear algebra from Professor Frenkel. He was indeed one of the most eccentric professors I had. He made a film called Rites of Math and Love whose trailer was very popular (as a laughing material) in our class.
Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
The weird thing is that while modern-style mathematics with lots of display maths is supposedly to be less dependent on subtleties of text (as opposed to the arguments of old-style topology books like Munkres, which use display equations a lot less and pack a lot of oomph into dense paragraphs with inlined symbols). But mathematical terminology actually changes a lot -- it's enough to open a page in Wikipedia and swi…
To be fair, a ‘campo’ is also a ‘corpo’ that is commutative.
Can you elaborate? Vector spaces and fields differ in how they define multiplication. In the former, we multiply vectors with scalars while in the latter we multiply two scalars.
Also, vector fields are functions from points to vectors whereas field is an algebraic structure.
Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
A half-remembered, and possibly apocryphal, story which another mathematician once told me: Langlands was once invited to lecture in France, and he chose to give his talk in French. Evidently his accent was not all that good, and the audience found it a bit painful. Jean-Pierre Serre, one of the leading mathematicians of the 20th century, and a Frenchman, was attending the lecture that day. He interrupted to ask a qu…
Frenchmen are legendarily intolerant of badly-spoken French. This was a recurring theme in my couple of years as a student at Alliance Française - when in France (most people hoped to go to college or grad school there) if you're not solid don't even try. In Brazil people will be glad you're trying and try to speak slowly in return.
> Frenchmen are legendarily intolerant of badly-spoken French.
It may have changed now. I have been living in Paris for several years, speaking strongly accented french (but mostly understandable), and I have had no tolerance problems so far, except the occasional person who prefers to speak in english to me.
Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, a ‘campo’ is also a ‘corpo’ that is commutative.
Can you elaborate? Vector spaces and fields differ in how they define multiplication. In the former, we multiply vectors with scalars while in the latter we multiply two scalars. Also, vector fields are functions from points to vectors whereas field is an algebraic structure.
I'm not entirely sure what he meant, but the flow maps of vector fields are semigroups. If irreversible, they're groups. And a field is like a group and a ring over the same set, right?
Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?
#57Working mathematician here -- 1. Langlands is indeed a great mathematician, whose work has been enormously influential. 2. Most of us aren't all that eccentric. He wrote his paper in Russian , a language which he (presumably) does not natively speak, apparently just for the heck of it? That's just weird. Most of the mathematicians I know, including the most influential ones, are relatively normal people. And they wan…
Presumably that's the paper in Russian - https://publications.ias.edu/sites/default/files/iztvestiya_... It's understandable, but with lots of grammatical, spelling and stylistic mistakes. Basically it reads like something Google Translate would produce.
He has a discussion at the very end (on the last two pages) about his decision to write in Russian, in which he acknowledges that he may not have done very well. Google Translate's version of the final paragraph:
> This article is a consequence of two pushes, first of all, an attempt to understand the nature of the geometric theory, to form a clear idea about the difference between it and the arithmetic theory and their similarity. Here I think I was successful, although I do not argue a little. Secondly, I wanted to significantly improve my knowledge of Russian. Here I had only limited success. For me, Russian is on a completely different level than the two foreign languages with which I am familiar, French and German. As I noted above, Russian is much more difficult than I appreciated, even more than Turkish, another language in which I have a limited but hard-to-work ability. Therefore, my efforts and the efforts of friends and acquaintances who encouraged me as I wrote this article had limited success. I am still pleased that, despite my age, I do not regret either the time or the effort that I have given her.
Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?
#58HN has heard of him: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Langlands%20points%3E3&sort=by...
Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this is my experience too. You should always attempt to use the language of where you are except in France. They would rather you spoke English than butchered their language. I usually keep it to please and thank you in french as a result. Although I did once use my high school french to ask where the swimming pool was once and had a bit of trouble deciphering the response I got (in french). So swimming pools a…
I think problem is, English accent is probably the worst . This is because pronunciation-wise there hardly are other two languages as different as English and French. (The French return the favor, obviously - their accent sounds just as terrible.)
Accent is such a non issue, in the UK the accent can be very different even 30 miles from one another, so let alone someone speaking it with a French, German or Spanish accent. It's still English and 99% of the time you can understand it. I assume the same is true of other languages too.
Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?
#60> Most mathematicians also agree that the Langlands Program could help find a proof for the Riemann Hypothesis, probably the most famous unsolved mathematical problem (about the distribution of prime numbers). These problems are just as abstract as Langlands’s own work, however, which means his research program as it was originally conceived has little relevance to everyday life.
I dunno, figuring out the Riemann Hypothesis could have some far reaching consequences for our understanding of prime numbers, and therefore cryptography, no?