April 19, 2012
University of California at Berkeley professor to give 30th annual Friends of Mathematics Lecture today
Edward Frenkel, professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley, will give the 30th annual Friends of Mathematics Lecture at 2:30 p.m. today in 1018 Throckmorton Hall. Frenkel's presentation will be "What Do Fermat's Last Theorem and Electro-magnetic Duality Have In Common?"
Fermat's Last Theorem may be viewed as a spectacular application of the Langlands Program, bringing together Number Theory and Harmonic Analysis. These ideas have propagated to other areas of mathematics, such as algebraic geometry and representation theory of infinite-dimensional Lie groups and Lie algebras. And in recent works by Witten and others, it was shown that the Langlands duality patterns are closely related to the electro-magnetic duality of four-dimensional quantum gauge theory. Frenkel will give an overview of these connections.