Born in Antony, France. He graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in 1986. In 1994 he received his Ph. D in the Arithmetic and Algebraic Geometry team at the Université de Paris-Sud. Currently he is a permanent professor of mathematics at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (I.H.E.S) in Bures-sur-Yvette, France.
In 2002 at the 24th International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing, China he received the Fields Medal together with Vladimir Voevodsky. Lafforgue made outstanding contributions to Langlands program in the fields of the number theory and analysis.