ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Local Langlands conjectures

Imagine you have a bunch of toy cars and a bunch of toy garages. Each car fits perfectly in a certain garage, and there’s no other garage that will fit that car. Similarly, in math, we have something called a “number field” and a “local field.” These are like the garages and the cars.

The local Langlands conjectures are like a set of rules that tell us which cars (or representations, as mathematicians like to call them) fit in which garages (or automorphic forms). It’s like a big puzzle where we’re trying to figure out which toy car fits in which garage, but instead of actual toys, we’re using math concepts.

Mathematicians have been working on this puzzle for many years, and they’ve come up with some pretty sophisticated methods to solve it. But there’s still a lot we don’t know, and that’s why the local Langlands conjectures are still considered a “conjecture,” which means it’s a smart guess that hasn’t been proven yet. But with more research and discoveries in math, we might one day be able to prove it!