Vincent Lafforgue

Lafforgue was awarded the 2000 EMS Prize for his contribution to the K-theory of operator algebras: the proof of the Baum–Connes conjecture for discrete co-compact subgroups of S L ( 3 , R ) {\displaystyle SL(3,\mathbb {R} )} , S L ( 3 , C ) {\displaystyle SL(3,\mathbb {C} )} , S L ( 3 , Q p ) {\displaystyle SL(3,\mathbb {Q} _{p})} and some other locally compact groups, and of more general objects. He participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad and wrote two perfect papers in 1990 and 1991, making him one of only two French mathematicians to win two gold medals (besides Joseph Najnudel, 1997–98). Lafforgue was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 2002 in Beijing, China and a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 2018 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He was awarded the 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics for his "elegant and groundbreaking contributions to the Langlands program in the function field case", namely for establishing the Langlands Correspondence (the direction from automorphic forms to Galois representations) for connected reductive groups defined over global function fields.

Vincent Lafforgue (born 20 January 1974) is a French mathematician who is active in algebraic geometry, especially in the Langlands program, and a CNRS "Directeur de Recherches" at the Institute Fourier in Grenoble. He is the younger brother of Fields Medalist Laurent Lafforgue.