Center of a clique

Unifying nature’s fundamental forces —gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces —was a goal that eluded Albert Einstein. 

If Langlands’ theories help make it happen, the cosmic symmetry will come with a poetic touch: Langlands’ office in Princeton is the same one Einstein occupied during the later part of his two decades at the Institute for Advanced Studies, until his death in 1955.

“He’s like a modern-day Einstein,” says Frenkel, author of Love and Math, a book about the Langlands Program. “But everybody knows about Einstein and nobody knows about Langlands. Why is that?”

That kind of talk makes Langlands cringe. He’s sure of his achievements but skeptical about their value in the real world. Pure math is an adventure of the mind, unconcerned with applications. 

He’s even uncomfortable with the program that bears his name, believing its expansion into the field of differential geometry —a branch that uses calculus to study the properties of geometric shapes —has been poorly thought out.

Most of all, he recognizes his work is complete nonsense to all but a tiny clique.

“What normal person cares whether the square root of two is a rational number?” he asks, referring to numbers than can be written as fractions.