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Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?

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Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?

#21

Post by impendia »

aquadrop wrote: post #20
impendia wrote: post #15

Working 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…

According to Wikipedia: " Langlands likes to learn foreign languages, both for better understanding of foreign publications on his topic and just as a hobby. He speaks French, Turkish, German and Russian". I'd say it's not _that_ weird, if he likes foreign languages, to combine both his passions and write one paper in Russian :) Also considering there are actually a lot of mathematicians who can read and write Russia…

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 question, in English.

Declining to take the hint, Langlands answered in French and carried on with his lecture.

Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?

#22

Post by huhtenberg »

impendia wrote: post #15

Working 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.

Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?

#23

Post by ColinWright »

imron wrote: post #19

But did he win the Putman?

It seems to me that doing well in competitions is a separate question from going on to do amazing research. There are plenty of people who did phenomenally well in competitions and then went on to be successful being mathematicians in other fields, working at Big Co, or starting up their own company, but most of the really, really top mathematicians that I know didn't go in for competitions.

There are exceptions, but it's almost like being a top research mathematician is independent (in the technical sense) of doing well in competitions.

Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?

#24

Post by thanatropism »

impendia wrote: post #21
aquadrop wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Wikipedia: " Langlands likes to learn foreign languages, both for better understanding of foreign publications on his topic and just as a hobby. He speaks French, Turkish, German and Russian". I'd say it's not _that_ weird, if he likes foreign languages, to combine both his passions and write one paper in Russian :) Also considering there are actually a lot of mathematicians who can read and write Russia…

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.

Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?

#25

Post by garblegarble »

coldtea wrote: post #8
garblegarble wrote: post #4

It's Robert Langlands[1], for anybody who doesn't want to give in to the clickbait title 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Langlands

We should stop abusing the term clickbait for everything and anything. Journalists (and editors) used juicy titles since centuries, as part of the art of writing a piece, even when the piece was buried well inside a newspaper or magazine that you would have already bought to see it anyway... "This is an article about Robert_Langlands the mathematician" doesn't strike as nice as a title. This is a typical journalistic…

>This is a typical journalistic title, and not at all the same as the modern notion of clickbait

I can see where you're coming from (since the article does contain interesting details and isn't just restating the headline), but I think this title sits closer to modern clickbait, in the spectrum that runs from dry description to full-on clickbait.

I will admit, that this style of title has always infuriated me in particular: it feels like the editor is infantilising their audience by imagining the public only know the things that journalists decide to write.

Also I'd personally expect a journalistic title to at least mention the subject. Even something as simple as "Robert Langlands: the mathematician you've never heard of" would be a big improvement

Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?

#26

Post by thanatropism »

ColinWright wrote: post #23
imron wrote: post #19

But did he win the Putman?

It seems to me that doing well in competitions is a separate question from going on to do amazing research. There are plenty of people who did phenomenally well in competitions and then went on to be successful being mathematicians in other fields, working at Big Co, or starting up their own company, but most of the really, really top mathematicians that I know didn't go in for competitions. There are exceptions, but…

I've had a couple of experiences with math olympians. They were both very bright (I don't know how they're not followed by throngs of beautiful ${people who are attracted to men} -- solving compass-and-straightedge problems can be as performative and awe-inspiring as an impressive guitar solo), but they lacked in other hard-to-define areas. They had thin skins for criticism (people like me who have failed in competitions and gotten low grades etc. have a lot more emotional scar tissue) and tended to overestimate themselves. Interestingly, they were never arrogant, they just overpromised a little.

They were still valuable workers, but took a strange onboarding process compared to regular dummies (like me) who just want to be the best they possibly can under skull constraints.

Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?

#27

Post by huhtenberg »

thanatropism wrote: post #24
impendia wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

Speaking bad French to French people helps them to suddenly remember that they also speak English.

Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?

#28

Post by celticninja »

thanatropism wrote: post #24
impendia wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

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 and libraries and please and thank you :)

Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?

#29

Post by thanatropism »

Double_a_92 wrote: post #18
thanatropism wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the library here they have a book called "Russian for Mathematicians".

Maybe if you need to look up some soviet era literature?

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 switch languages to see.

A "field" in the algebraic sense (the real numbers are a "complete ordered field") in portuguese is corpo, but vector fields are campos. And both in Portuguese and French, manifolds and algebraic varieties are the same word (variedades/varietés).

Maybe if one starts graphing these separations and collisions across many languages some structure emerges -- obviously no one mixes up algebraic fields with physics fields, but the manifold/variety collision hints at some historical commonality that matters for expressive power at the level of a Grothendieck trying to say something sweeping about the entire landscape of mathematics.

Re: Robert Langlands: The Greatest Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of?

#30

Post by madez »

h91wka wrote: post #14
coldtea wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised how "regular everyday guys" haven't heard of him. In fact I'd be surprised if most US citizens can even name the vice president of the US, even with all the hoopla around Trump's presidency...

Conversation topic transition diagram in the past few years: Politics -> Trump History -> Trump Computing -> Trump ... Mathematics -> Trump Trump -> Trump * -> Trump That gets old pretty soon.

Is this how Godwin's law ends?
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