Chronicle of Higher Education: Fresh from winning the top international math prize, the Fields medal, Ngo Bao Chau has joined the mathematics faculty of the University of Chicago. Paul Basken’s profile of Ngo in this week’s Chronicle is distinctive in that it incorporates an informative sidebar on the work that earned Ngo his medal, his proof last year of the fundamental lemma that underlies a group of conjectures published in 1967 by Robert Langlands. Known as the Langlands program, the conjectures unite concepts in number theory and group theory and could help physicists devise a fundamental theory that encompasses all the universe’s elementary particles and forces.
The finding that the Saturnian moon may host layers of icy slush instead of a global ocean could change how planetary scientists think about other icy moons as well.
Modeling the shapes of tree branches, neurons, and blood vessels is a thorny problem, but researchers have just discovered that much of the math has already been done.
January 29, 2026 12:52 PM
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