Topic: Why Gauss’ Gold is Langlands’ Triviality

Time & Date: 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm, Nov 19, 2021 (Friday)

Venue: TD102

Speaker: Prof. Daniel WONG

Abstract:

In the late 18th Century, Gauss proved the Theorem of Quadratic Reciprocity, which he called Theorema Aureum (the Golden Theorem). In this talk, we review the theorem of Gauss using middle school mathematics, and put it under the perspective of the Langlands program - one of the center stages of research in contemporary mathematics. As a consequence, the Gold in Gauss' eyes is just next to the most trivial case of Langlands program.

Throughout the talk, we will mention its relation with the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem (unproved for 300+ years, until Wiles gave a proof in 1995), along with two of the seven Millennium Problems stated by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000 - the Riemann Hypothesis (unproved for 150+ years) and the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture (unproved for 60+ years). Proving either one of the conjectures will result in a prize of $1,000,000!

About the Speaker:

Kayue (Daniel) Wong is an Assistant Professor in Mathematics at Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. He finished his 4-year master’s degree at Wadham College, Oxford University under the Lee Shau Kee Scholarship. Afterwards, he obtained his Ph.D. degree in Mathematics at Cornell University. His research interests are on representation theory of Lie groups and quantization.