UBC-PIMS Mathematical Sciences Faculty Award Lecture: Rachel Ollivier

A video of this event is available on mathtube.org

Abstract: 

The Langlands program, initiated in the 1960s, is a set of conjectures predicting a unification of number theory and the representation theory of groups. More precisely, the Langlands correspondence provides a way to interpret results in number theory in terms of group theory, and vice versa. 

In this talk we sketch a few aspects of the local Langlands correspondence using elementary examples. We then comment on some questions raised by the emerging "mod p" Langlands program. 

Biography: 

Professor Ollivier works in the Langlands Programme, a central theme in pure mathematics which predicts deep connections between number theory and representation theory. She has made profound contributions in the new branches of the "p-adic" and "mod-p" Langlands correspondence that emerged from Fontaine's work on studying the p-adic Galois representation, and is one of the pioneers shaping this new field. The first results on the mod-p Langlands correspondence were limited to the group GL2(Qp); but Dr. Ollivier has proved that this is the only group for which this holds, a surprising result which has motivated much subsequent research.

She has also made important and technically challenging contributions in the area of representation theory of p-adic groups, in particular, in the study of the Iwahori-Hecke algebra. In joint work with P. Schneider, Professor Ollivier used methods of Bruhat-Tits theory to make substantial progress in understanding these algebras. She has obtained deep results of algebraic nature, recently defining a new invariant that may shed light on the special properties of the group GL2(Qp).

Rachel Ollivier received her PhD from University Paris Diderot (Paris 7), and then held a research position at ENS Paris. She subsequently was an assistant professor at the University of Versailles and then Columbia University, before joining the UBC Department of Mathematics in 2013.

Rachel is the recepient of the 2015 UBC Mathematics and Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences Faculty Award.