The Mathematician Who Found the Hidden Trace of Symmetry

Sophie Morel became a leading number theorist through work on Shimura varieties, intersection cohomology and the trace formula. Born near Paris in 1979, she entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1999 and completed her doctorate at Paris-Sud in 2005 under Gérard Laumon. After a Clay Research Fellowship, she became a professor at Harvard in 2009 and Princeton in 2012 before joining CNRS and ENS Lyon in 2020. This documentary follows the ideas behind her advances in the Langlands program. an endu

The Langlands program seeks deep correspondences among number theory, geometry and symmetry, but proving them often requires extracting arithmetic information from complicated geometric spaces. Morel developed powerful methods for studying the cohomology of Shimura varieties and interpreting trace formulas. Her career also marked important institutional milestones for women in mathematics. This documentary reveals how abstract geometry becomes a tool for uncovering hidden arithmetic structure. a