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B.C.-born professor awarded 'Nobel Prize' of mathematics

A Canadian mathematician has been awarded the Abel Prize — often referred to as the Nobel prize of mathematics, for a theory 50 years in the making.

Robert Langlands, 81, who was born in New Westminster, B.C., was awarded the prize for developing what the Abel Prize citation describes as a "grand unified theory of mathematics."

The Abel Prize was created by the government of Norway in 2003, and comes with a cash prize of more than $1 million.

"I don't know quite what to say," Langlands said of the award, which was announced by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo on Tuesday, "some of my colleagues made a real effort."

Designed 'visionary' program

Langlands developed the Langlands program in 1967 when he was a 30-year-old associate professor at Princeton University.

It conjectured relationships between different mathematical theories — from harmonic analysis (the representation of signals as the superposition of basic waves) to number theory (the properties and relationships between numbers) — which were previously considered unrelated fields of study.

The Abel Prize citation described the program as "visionary."

"No other project in modern mathematics has as wide a scope, has produced so many deep results, and has so many people working on it," the citation reads in part.

Over the past 50 years, the program has enlisted hundreds of the world's best mathematicians and led to some of the biggest mathematical breakthroughs in decades.

Other mathematicians have previously been awarded the Fields medal — regarded as one of the highest honours in mathematics — for research completed using Langlands' approach. In return, these partial breakthroughs led to solutions of problems that went unresolved for centuries, such as Fermat's last theorem, which dates back to 1637.

'Tremendous intellectual charms'

Langlands, who is now based in Montreal, said he first realized his talent for mathematics while helping out in his dad's White Rock lumberyard.

At age 13, he could instantaneously calculate the cost of the lumber being loaded into trucks, to the amazement of the baffled adults calculating metre by painstaking metre.

He later completed an undergraduate degree in mathematics at the University of British Columbia, before going on to a masters degree and a PhD at Yale University.

He is now a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J. — so renowned, it is simply referred to by mathematicians as "The Institute" — where he occupies the office that once belonged to Albert Einstein.

Langland said he's pondering retirement, but mathematics has a way of drawing him back in.

"I would like to give it up, but it's a subject that has tremendous intellectual charms," he said.

"But one also must think about other things, because there are lots of things to think about. It's a complicated world we live in. There are political and historical contexts, there's poetry."

"And mathematics can, frankly, be very time consuming."

Langlands will receive the Abel Prize from King Harald V of Norway at a ceremony in Oslo, Norway on May 22.

With files from Tim Weekes