Origins & Early Life

Robert Phelan Langlands (; born October 6, 1936) is a Canadian mathematician. He 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 is emeritus professor and occupied Albert Einstein's office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, until 2020 when he retired. Langlands was born in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada, in 1936 to Robert Langlands and Kathleen J Phelan.

Pivotal Works & Achievements

He has two younger sisters (Mary b. 1938; Sally b. 1941). In 1945, his family moved to White Rock, near the US border, where his parents had a building supply and construction business. He graduated from Semiahmoo Secondary School and started enrolling at the University of British Columbia at the age of 16, receiving his undergraduate degree in mathematics in 1957; he continued at UBC to receive a M.Sc.

Enduring Legacy & Impact

in 1958. He then went to Yale University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1960. His first academic position was at Princeton University from 1960 to 1967, where he worked as an associate professor...

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