The conjectures can be stated variously in ways that are closely related but not obviously equivalent.
Reciprocity The starting point of the program was
Emil Artin's
reciprocity law, which generalizes
quadratic reciprocity. The
Artin reciprocity law applies to a
Galois extension of an
algebraic number field whose
Galois group is
abelian; it assigns
L-functions to the one-dimensional representations of this Galois group, and states that these
L-functions are identical to certain
Dirichlet L-series or more general series (that is, certain analogues of the
Riemann zeta function) constructed from
Hecke characters. The precise correspondence between these different kinds of
L-functions constitutes Artin's reciprocity law. For non-abelian Galois groups and higher-dimensional representations of them,
L-functions can be defined in a natural way:
Artin L-functions. Langlands' insight was to find the proper generalization of
Dirichlet L-functions, which would allow the formulation of Artin's statement in Langland's more general setting.
Hecke had earlier related Dirichlet
L-functions with
automorphic forms (
holomorphic functions on the upper half plane of the
complex number plane \mathbb{C} that satisfy certain
functional equations). Langlands then generalized these to
automorphic cuspidal representations, which are certain infinite dimensional irreducible representations of the
general linear group GL(
n) over the
adele ring of \mathbb{Q} (the
rational numbers). (This ring tracks all the completions of \mathbb{Q}, see
p-adic numbers.) Langlands attached
automorphic L-functions to these automorphic representations, and conjectured that every Artin
L-function arising from a finite-dimensional representation of the Galois group of a
number field is equal to one arising from an automorphic cuspidal representation. This is known as his
reciprocity conjecture. Roughly speaking, this conjecture gives a correspondence between automorphic representations of a reductive group and homomorphisms from a
Langlands group to an
L-group. This offers numerous variations, in part because the definitions of Langlands group and
L-group are not fixed. Over
local fields this is expected to give a parameterization of
L-packets of admissible irreducible representations of a
reductive group over the local field. For example, over the real numbers, this correspondence is the
Langlands classification of representations of real reductive groups. Over
global fields, it should give a parameterization of automorphic forms.
Functoriality The functoriality conjecture states that a suitable homomorphism of
L-groups is expected to give a correspondence between automorphic forms (in the global case) or representations (in the local case). Roughly speaking, the Langlands reciprocity conjecture is the special case of the functoriality conjecture when one of the reductive groups is trivial.
Generalized functoriality Langlands generalized the idea of functoriality: instead of using the general linear group GL(
n), other connected
reductive groups can be used. Furthermore, given such a group
G, Langlands constructs the
Langlands dual group
LG, and then, for every automorphic cuspidal representation of
G and every finite-dimensional representation of
LG, he defines an
L-function. One of his conjectures states that these
L-functions satisfy a certain functional equation generalizing those of other known
L-functions. He then goes on to formulate a very general "Functoriality Principle". Given two reductive groups and a (well behaved)
morphism between their corresponding
L-groups, this conjecture relates their automorphic representations in a way that is compatible with their
L-functions. This functoriality conjecture implies all the other conjectures presented so far. It is of the nature of an
induced representation construction—what in the more traditional theory of
automorphic forms had been called a '
lifting', known in special cases, and so is covariant (whereas a
restricted representation is contravariant). Attempts to specify a direct construction have only produced some conditional results. All these conjectures can be formulated for more general fields in place of \mathbb{Q}:
algebraic number fields (the original and most important case),
local fields, and function fields (finite
extensions of
Fp(
t) where
p is a
prime and
Fp(
t) is the field of rational functions over the
finite field with
p elements).
Geometric conjectures The geometric Langlands program, suggested by
Gérard Laumon following ideas of
Vladimir Drinfeld, arises from a geometric reformulation of the usual Langlands program that attempts to relate more than just irreducible representations. In simple cases, it relates -adic representations of the
étale fundamental group of an
algebraic curve to objects of the
derived category of -adic sheaves on the
moduli stack of
vector bundles over the curve. In 2024, a 9-person collaborative project led by
Dennis Gaitsgory announced a proof of the (categorical, unramified) geometric Langlands conjecture leveraging
Hecke eigensheaves as part of the proof.{{cite web ==Status==