Laurent Lafforgue
Huawei Technologies France’s official Twitter account Tuesday released a video about its new member, Laurent Lafforgue, a prominent mathematician and Fields Medal winner, who joined the leading Chinese tech giant in September.
In the video, Lafforgue said that becoming part of Huawei is an exploration of a new world. His first contact with Huawei’s research team happened at an applied mathematics conference in 2017. He said he was surprised the team was interested in his research. “It is totally exceptional that Huawei adopts 10 to 20 years of perspectives in developing projects,” he said.
Born in 1966, Lafforgue is a member of the French Academy of Sciences. He won a silver medal at International Mathematical Olympiad when he was 18. His essential contributions in the fields of number theory and analysis, and algebraic functional geometry earned him the Fields Medal in 2002. Working mainly on the Langlands Program, a set of very deep conjectures, Lafforgue demonstrated one of these conjectures: the Langlands correspondence on function bodies.
In the fall this year, Lafforgue joined Huawei Technologies France to conduct works on topos theory in conjunction with the company’s researchers. The topos theory is recognized as a bridge connecting different mathematical theories. Breakthroughs in this field will considerably advance communication theory and artificial intelligence.
Lafforgue is not the only Fields Medal winner who has joined Huawei.
Pierre-Louis Lions, a professor at the College de France, Alessio Figallia, a professor at ETH Zurich, and Maxim Kontsevich from the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies are working for the Lagrange Research Center set up by Huawei in Paris in 2020.
The center is a platform open to excellent mathematicians around the world and is also aimed at cultivating young researchers.
Every year, the Shenzhen-based Huawei invests over 10 percent of its sales revenue in the research and development of basic research and theories. In the past 10 years, the company has spent 720 billion yuan (US$113 billion) on R&D and the company boasts at least 700 mathematicians, 800 physicists and 120 chemists, its founder Ren Zhengfei said in August.
In an internal document Huawei released in 2016 and Ren’s speech in 2018, the company stressed repeatedly that basic science development has strategic significance. Cooperating with universities around the world, Huawei strives to advance basic research and experiments.