## Conférences, séminaires, ...

### CRM - University of Ottawa Distinguished Lecture Series

 MODIFICATION: title and abstract added TITLE: Matrices almost of order two SPEAKER: David Vogan (MIT) DATE: Vendredi, 19 Septembre 2014 TIME: 3:30 pm ROOM: B005 ABSTRACT: Langlands' conjectures about automorphic forms suggest that infinite-dimensional irreducible representations of $$GL(n,R)$$ (something quite subtle) correspond more or less to conjugacy classes of elements of order 2 in $$GL(n,C)$$ (something extremely simple). I'll explain where this statement comes from, and how Langlands made precise the "more or less" so that the statement is actually true. I'll explain further how to use the same point of view to address other interesting problems, like Cartan's classification of real semisimple Lie groups. About the speaker: David Vogan received the B.A. and S.M. degrees from the University of Chicago in 1974, and the Ph.D. from MIT in 1976 under the direction of Bertram Kostant. He continued as an Instructor, and Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, before joining the MIT mathematics faculty in 1979. His research interests include group representations and Lie algebras. He is a member of the research group Atlas of Lie groups and representations, which in 2007 computed the character table of the Lie group $$E8$$, attracting a great deal of international press. He was selected by the MIT Department Faculty as the Robert E. Collins Distinguished Scholar in 2007. In 2011, he received the AMS Levi L. Conant Prize for his article, "The Character Table for $$E8$$". He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1996). He has given many distinguished lectures, including a plenary address at the ICM in Berkeley in 1986. He is President of the American Mathematical Society (2013-15).