One of the biggest stories in science is quietly playing out in the world of abstract mathematics. Over the course of last year, researchers fulfilled a decades-old dream when they unveiled a proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture ' a key piece of a group of interconnected problems called the Langlands programme. The proof ' a gargantuan effort ' validates the intricate and far-reaching Langlands programme, which is often hailed as the grand unified theory of mathematics but remains largely unproven. Yet the work's true impact might lie not in what it settles, but in the new avenues of inquiry it reveals. Proving the geometric Langlands conjecture has long been considered one of the deepest and most enigmatic pursuits in modern mathematics. Ultimately, it took a team of nine mathematicians to crack the problem, in a series of five papers spanning almost 1,000 pages1'5. The group was led by Dennis Gaitsgory at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, and Sam...
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