A mathematical breakthrough this year is so complex that other mathematicians struggled to understand it, but it has already led to progress in other areas of mathematics.
in may Sam Ruskin at Yale University and his colleagues published a series of five articles, totaling more than 1,000 pages, He proved Langland’s geometric conjectureat the end of decades of work. The problem is actually a simpler formulation of an even larger mathematical project, the Langlands program, which seeks to do…