Ngô Bao Châu

The 2004 Clay Research Award was made to Gérard Laumon and Ngô Bao Châu for their proof of the Fundamental Lemma for unitary groups.

The lemma is a conjectured identity between orbital integrals for two groups, e.g., the unitary groups U(n) and U(p)xU(q), where p+q = n. Combined with the Arthur-Selberg trace formula, it enables one to prove relations between automorphic forms on different groups and is a key step towards proving links between certain automorphic forms and Galois representations. This is one of the aims of the Langlands program, which seeks a far-reaching unification of ideas in number theory and representation theory. The result of Laumon and Ngô uses the equivariant cohomology approach introduced by Goresky, Kottwitz, and MacPherson, who proved the lemma in the split and equal valuation case. The proof for the unitary case, which is significant for applications, requires many new ideas, including Laumon’s deformation strategy and Ngô’s purity result which is based on a geometric interpretation of the endoscopy theory of Langlands and Kottwitz in terms of the Hitchin fibration.