Sam Raskin appointed the James E. English Professor of Mathematics
Sam Raskin has been appointed the James E. English Professor of Mathematics. Raskin is a leading geometric representation theorist who joined Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) in the Department of Mathematics on July 1.
Raskin comes to Yale from the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a B.A. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
His research primarily focuses on the geometric Langlands program, which aims to establish fundamental dualities in geometry analogous to phenomena widely believed to exist in arithmetic and quantum field theory. Raskin contributed to a series of recent breakthroughs the area. First, he released a paper in which he provided the foundation for completing the geometric Langlands program. His colleagues have described this paper as a “missing link” that has made it possible to answer questions that had long been elusive. Raskin helped introduce new geometric tools for understanding certain arithmetic phenomena in the Langlands program, connecting two aspects of Langlands duality and yielding new insights into both. In addition, Raskin’s work on local geometric Langlands duality has introduced new geometric methods for studying affine W-algebras and Kac-Moody representation and helped settle the Frenkel-Gaitsgory conjecture on localization at the critical level.
Raskin’s work has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Mathematical Sciences and the Sloan Foundation. His papers have appeared in Annals of Mathematics, the Journal of the AMS, and other top journals in the field, while his preprints are widely studied. As a result of his influential research findings, Raskin has become a highly sought-after speaker. He has given invited talks at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES), MIT, the University of Chicago, the Tata Institute, the Sorbonne, and other institutions. He also helped lead the winter school on local geometric Langlands theory at University Paris 7.
In addition to his research, Raskin is a sought-after mentor and skilled educator. He has taught undergraduate-level courses in integral calculus, differential equations, and calculus on manifolds; his graduate course offerings have included seminars on algebraic geometry, p-adic Hodge theory, and abstract algebra. His graduate students have gone on to postdoctoral positions at UCLA and the University of California, Berkeley.
