The central 'Shimura variety' concept has been tamed (by application of Lie group and algebraic group theory, and the extraction of the concept 'parametrises interesting family of Hodge structures' by reference to the algebraic geometry theory of 'motives', which is still largely conjectural). He also argues for a 'romantic' approach, something he finds lacking in the younger generation of mathematician. Shimura himself has described his approach as 'phenomenological': his interest is in finding new types of interesting behaviour in the theory of automorphic forms. Even to define in general a Shimura variety is quite a formidable task: they bear, roughly speaking, the same relation to general Hodge structures as modular curves do to elliptic curves. It equally brought out the concept, in general, of Shimura variety which is the higher-dimensional equivalent of modular curve. This work (and other developments it provoked) provided some of the 'raw data' later incorporated into the Langlands program. Shimura then wrote a long series of major papers, extending the phenomena found in the theory of complex multiplication and modular forms to higher dimensions (amongst other results). They wrote a book (the first book treatment) on the complex multiplication of abelian varieties, an area which in collaboration they had opened up. Shimura was a colleague and a friend of Yutaka Taniyama.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |