Gauge Theory and the Geometric Langlands Program

The Langlands program of number theory, or what we might call Langlands duality, was proposed in more or less its present form by Robert Langlands, in the late 1960s. It is a kind of unified scheme for many results in number theory ranging from quadratic reciprocity, which is hundreds of years old, to modern results such as Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s last theorem, which involved a sort of special case of the Langlands program. For today, however, I will not assume any prior knowledge of the Langlands program.