Robert Langlands

Robert Phelan Langlands is a Canadian mathematician, born in New Westminster, British Columbia, on 6 October 1936, who is best known as the founder of the Langlands program, a vast web of conjectures and results connecting representation theory and automorphic forms to the study of Galois groups in number theory, for which he received the 2018 Abel Prize. He earned a Ph.D. at Yale University in 1960, taught at Princeton and Yale, and was appointed Hermann Weyl Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1972, becoming professor emeritus in 2007. His thesis was on the analytical theory of Lie semigroups, but he soon moved into representation theory, adapting the methods of Harish-Chandra to automorphic forms and constructing an analytical theory of Eisenstein series for reductive groups. As an application he proved the Weil conjecture on Tamagawa numbers for simply connected Chevalley groups over the rationals.