Laurent Lafforgue (IHES, France)
French mathematician, made outstanding contributions to Langlands’ program in the fields of number theory and analysis, and in particular proved the Langlands conjectures for the automorphism group of a function field. The crucial contribution by Lafforgue to solve this question is the construction of compactifications of certain moduli stacks of shtukas. The proof was the result of more than six years of concentrated efforts. In 2002 at the 24th International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing, China, he received the Fields Medal. Currently he is a research director of CNRS, detached as permanent professor of mathematics at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (I.H.E.S) in France.