The main other thing I did on day two of the congress was go to a reception in the evening hosted by the French Embassy. It was less formal than that makes it sound, and as I circulated I met a number of people I hadn’t seen for quite a while, as well as others I had got to know at the congress itself. The French ambassador, who was disconcertingly young looking, gave a speech, as did Artur Avila (as you know, Avila, like Ngo four years ago, is French), and one other person, whose name I’ve annoyingly forgotten. One interesting nugget of information to come out of those speeches was that Paris is planning to bid for the 2022 ICM. If that bid is successful, then Avila will have two successive ICMs in his home country. There was plenty of food at the reception, so, as I had hoped, I didn’t need to think about finding supper. When we arrived, we were asked for our business cards. In common with approximately 99.9% of mathematicians, I don’t have a business card, but for cardless people it was sufficient to write our names on little bits of paper. This, it turned out, was to be entered in a draw for a bottle of wine. When the time came, it was Avila who drew out the pieces of paper. Apparently, this is a Korean custom. There were in fact two bottles going, so two chances to win, which sort of became three chances when the person who should have won the first bottle wasn’t there to claim it. And so, for the first time in my life … not really. I have never won anything in a raffle and that puzzling sequence continued.

The next morning kicked off (after breakfast at the place on the corner opposite my hotel, which served decent espressos) with Jim Arthur, who gave a talk about the Langlands programme and his role in it. He told us at the beginning that he was under strict instructions to make his talk comprehensible — which is what you are supposed to do as a plenary lecturer, but this time it was taken more seriously, which resulted in a higher than average standard. Ingrid Daubechies deserves a lot of credit for that. He explained that in response to that instruction, he was going to spend about two thirds of his lecture giving a gentle introduction to the Langlands programme and about one third talking about his own work. In the event he messed up the timing and left only about five minutes for his contribution, but for everybody except him that was just fine: we all knew he was there because he had done wonderful work, and most of us stood to learn a lot more from hearing about the background than from hearing about the work itself.

(more…)