Jean-Loup Waldspurger

The 2009 Clay Research Award was made to Jean-Loup Waldspurger for his work in p-adic harmonic analysis, particularly his contributions to the transfer conjecture and the fundamental lemma.  This work, combined with that of others, makes it possible to finally resolve important, long-standing parts of the Langlands program.

The Langlands program is a collection of conjectures and theorems that unify the theory of automorphic forms, relating it intimately to the main stream of number theory, with close relations to harmonic analysis on algebraic groups as well as arithmetic algebraic geometry. Since its origins in the winter of 1966-67, when it was laid out in a letter from Langlands to André Weil, it has served as the basis of much deep work, including applications to many famous problems in number theory, e.g., Artin’s conjectures on L-functions, Fermat’s last theorem, and the behaviour of Hasse-Weil zeta functions.