I'm very fond of the school I attended since my earliest years. My grandparents began working when they were twelve, but they always respected school very much and passed on this respect to their children and grandchildren.

Laurent Lafforgue established the Langlands Correspondences for a much wider class of cases than previously known. These correspondences connect arithmetic properties to analytic properties of some special group representations called automorphic representations. It was formulated by Robert Langlands at the end of the 1960's. In rank 1, this conjecture is nothing other than the now traditional "class field theory" of Emil Artin. In rank 2 and for number fields, the first great confirmations of this conjecture were the proof of the conjecture of Ramanujan by Pierre Deligne and the proof by Langlands himself of the conjecture of Artin except for a case. At the beginning of the seventies, Vladimir Drinfeld attacked the conjectures in a more general algebraic context. For that purpose, he built varieties similar to modular curves and showed certain cases of the conjecture of Langlands in rank 2. Then, as these varieties did not make it possible to reach all desired representations, Drinfeld introduced the "chtoucas", a step which enabled him to prove the conjecture of Langlands in rank 2. This turned out to make the general case accessible, after formidable technical difficulties were surmounted. The crucial contribution by Laurent Lafforgue to solve this question is the construction of compactifications of certain varieties of modules. The proof, which is monumental, is the result of more than six years of concentrated efforts.

Laurent Lafforgue was awarded the Fields Medal for his proof of the Langlands correspondence for the general linear groups $GL_{r}$ over function fields of positive characteristic. His approach to this problem follows the basic strategy introduced twenty-five years ago by V Drinfeld in his proof for $GL_{2}$. Already Drinfeld's proof is extremely difficult. Lafforgue's proof is a real tour de force, taking up as it does several hundred pages of highly condensed reasoning. By his achievement Lafforgue has proved himself a mathematician of remarkable strength and perseverance.

Laurent Lafforgue has made an enormous advance in the Langlands Program by proving the global Langlands correspondence for function fields. The Langlands Program, formulated by Robert Langlands in the 1960s, proposes a web of relationships connecting Galois representations and automorphic forms. The influence of the Langlands Program has grown over the years, with each new advance hailed as an important achievement. The roots of the Langlands program are found in one of the deepest results in number theory, the Law of Quadratic Reciprocity, which was first proved by Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1801. This law allows one to describe, for any positive integer d, the primes p for which the congruence $x^{2} = d mod p$ has a solution. Despite many proofs of this law (Gauss himself produced six different proofs), it remains one of the most mysterious facts in number theory. The search for generalizations of the Law of Quadratic Reciprocity stimulated a great deal of research in number theory in the nineteenth century. Landmark work by Emil Artin in the 1920s produced the most general reciprocity law known up to that time. One of the original motivations behind the Langlands Program was to provide a complete understanding of reciprocity laws.

The global Langlands correspondence for $GL_{n}$ proved by Lafforgue provides a complete understanding of reciprocity laws for function fields. Lafforgue established, for any given function field, a precise link between the representations of its Galois groups and the automorphic forms associated with the field. He built on work of 1990 Fields Medalist Vladimir Drinfeld, who in the 1970s proved the global Langlands correspondence for $GL_{2}$.

My specific interest in the topic of education began a few years ago when I signed a petition defending Greek and Latin as academic subjects, as they were in grave danger. Struck by this dramatic situation, denounced by just a handful of teachers, I began inquiring more into it, reading books by people of different ideological orientations, joined by their seriousness about the work, and by their passion for school and the future of young people. This reading shook me profoundly - Latin and Greek are just the tip of the iceberg! In France, even the teaching of the French language itself was at risk. The new French school no longer had anything to do with the one I had known only twenty-five years ago.

Does [the Committee] wish to "entrust the same experts whose policies have led to the present disaster of our schools with the task of elaborating the future policies", or will it have the salutary will to "radically break the ties with all the present educrats" and "work [...] on developing policy advice that the government may use to save our educational system from a complete and definite destruction?"

Students, all the students, are the primary victims of the destruction of the school. This destruction has resulted from educational policies of all the governments of the last few decades. It is not the teachers who are responsible for it, for they are victims themselves: firstly in that they have been prevented from teaching correctly, by the publication of national curricula which are increasingly disorganized, incoherent and emptied of content; then because the knowledge gaps accumulated by their students over the course of years have made the conditions of teaching ever more difficult, and have exposed them to incidents of increasing incivility and violence on the part of adolescents who have never been taught either the elementary understandings, the habits of work, or the self-control which are indispensable to the progress of their studies; and finally because the younger generation of teachers has suffered from an already degraded educational program, so that their own understanding is less certain than that of their elders, and, with the exception of some well tempered characters, has been disoriented by the absurd training so prodigally distributed by the teachers colleges.

Let us take the example of the four operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Their teaching has been considerably retarded and neglected in recent decades, to where the majority of middle school children do not know the multiplication tables and many high school students are unable to add two fractions. These operations have been neglected because of the emergence of calculators, and the belief that an operation carried out by a machine can be the same thing as an operation carried out by a human spirit. It is the same thing as to result - supposing that one has calculated correctly and not made an error of fingering, and with the reservation that there are, just the same, many occasions where the calculator doesn't replace a mental calculation: I recently received a letter from a grandfather whose granddaughter had been fired after several hours as a salesgirl in a market because she was unable to make change. But above all, a calculator which one has programmed to perform certain operations knows only those operations for which it has been programmed. Whereas those same operations acquired and mastered by a student becomes nourishment for his spirit, empowers him, is digested by him, is made his own, enlarges and awakens his mathematical faculties and power. A familiarity with numbers, and similarly as to geometric objects, that permits the life that has been given him to enter, little by little, into the world of mathematics.