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Assuming that a person has taken standard undergraduate math courses (algebra, analysis, point-set topology), what other things he must know before he can understand the Langlands program and its geometric analogue?

What are the good books for learning these topics?

Is there any book which can explain the Langlands program to an undergraduate with very few prerequisites?

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    Re: the last question, it depends on what exactly you mean by "explain."2011-07-02
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    By "explain" I mean understanding the meaning of the Langland conjectures, why they are important and why is it being called the grand unified theory of mathematics.2011-07-02
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    Do the standard undergraduate courses include Galois and representation theory?2011-07-02
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    Well, consider they don't.2011-07-02
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    I can't give an answer, but I want to mention the book Introduction to the Langlands program by Bernstein, Gelbart et al.2011-07-02
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    I guess you'll need to learn a lot of Lie theory, algebraic groups theory, representation theory and algebraic number theory to do that.2011-07-02
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    @ABC, Langlands isn't really a grand unified theory of mathematics - that's just something Edward Frenkel said to convey the importance of the work to convey the importance of the program to the interested non-expert. If there is a grand unified theory of mathematics, it's probably (higher) category theory, or something related to that, perhaps the Curry-Howard isomorphism or some deeper collection of theorems about computation and math. Anyway, the Langlands program appears to be extremely deep, and looks very interesting - but I'd hardly call it a "grand unified theory."2018-06-21

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