Vladimir Gershonovich Drinfeld (Ukrainian: Володи́мир Ге́ршонович Дрінфельд; Russian: Влади́мир Ге́ршонович Дри́нфельд; born February 14, 1954), surname also romanized as Drinfel'd, is a mathematician from the former USSR, who emigrated to the United States and is currently working at the University of Chicago.
In 1974, at the age of twenty, Drinfeld announced a proof of the Langlands conjectures for GL2 over a global field of positive characteristic. In the course of proving the conjectures, Drinfeld introduced a new class of objects that he called "elliptic modules" (now known as Drinfeld modules). Later, in 1983, Drinfeld published a short article that expanded the scope of the Langlands conjectures. The Langlands conjectures, when published in 1967, could be seen as a sort of non-abelian class field theory. It postulated the existence of a natural one-to-one correspondence between Galois representations and some automorphic forms. The "naturalness" is guaranteed by the essential coincidence of L-functions. However, this condition is purely arithmetic and cannot be considered for a general one-dimensional function field in a straightforward way. Drinfeld pointed out that instead of automorphic forms one can consider automorphic perverse sheaves or automorphic D-modules. "Automorphicity" of these modules and the Langlands correspondence could be then understood in terms of the action of Hecke operators.
^O'Connor, J. J.; Robertson, E. F. "Vladimir Gershonovich Drinfeld". Biographies. School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland. Retrieved 21 May 2012.
Victor Ginzburg, Preface to the special volume of Transformation Groups (vol 10, 3–4, December 2005, Birkhäuser) on occasion of Vladimir Drinfeld's 50th birthday, pp 277–278, doi:10.1007/s00031-005-0400-6