ICM2014 — Bhargava, Gentry, Sanders

On my last day at the ICM I ended up going to fewer talks. As on the previous two days the first plenary lecture was not to be missed — it was Maryam Mirzakhani — so despite my mounting tiredness I set my alarm appropriately. I was a little surprised when I got there by just how empty it was, until eventually I saw that on the screens at the front it said that the lecture was cancelled because of her Fields medallist’s lecture the following Tuesday. I belonged to the small minority that had not noticed this, partly because I have had a lot of trouble with my supposedly-smart phone so was there with a temporary and very primitive replacement which was not the kind of phone on to which one could download a special ICM app that kept one up to date with things like this. I had planned to skip the second lecture of the morning, so I slightly rued my lost couple of hours of potential sleep, while also looking forward to being able to use those hours to work, or perhaps make progress with writing these posts — I can’t remember which of the two I ended up doing.

As a result, the first talk I went to was Manjul Bhargava’s plenary lecture, which was another superb example of what a plenary lecture should be like. Like Jim Arthur, he began by telling us an absolutely central general problem in number theory, but interestingly it wasn’t the same problem — though it is related.

ICM2014 — Kollár, Conlon, Katz, Krivelevich, Milnor

As the ICM recedes further into the past, these posts start to feel less and less fresh. I’ve had an enforced break from them as over the course of three days I drove my family from the south of France back to Cambridge. So I think I’ll try to do what I originally intended to do with all these posts, and be quite a lot briefer about each talk.

As I’ve already mentioned, Day 3 started with Jim Arthur’s excellent lecture on the Langlands programme. (In a comment on that post, somebody questioned my use of “Jim” rather than “James”. I’m pretty sure that’s how he likes to be known, but I can’t find any evidence of that on the web.) The next talk was by Demetrios Christodoulou, famous for some extraordinarily difficult results he has proved in general relativity. I’m not going to say anything about the talk, other than that I didn’t follow much of it, because he had a series of dense slides that he read word for word. The slides may even have been a suitably chopped up version of his article for the ICM proceedings, but I have not been able to check that. Anyhow, after a gentle introduction of about three or four minutes, I switched off.