“I am now elderly and have turned my efforts to other things – just a reading, in the original – of the very long (four volume) Turkish novel, Bir Ada Hikayesi,” mathematician Robert Langlands, now 87, told this author over an email.
Five years ago, in 2018, Dr. Langlands was awarded the Abel Prize, one of the highest honours for mathematicians, for “his visionary program connecting representation theory to number theory”.
This program was set in motion in 1967 when Dr. Langlands, then 30 and at Princeton University, wrote a 17-page letter to the French mathematician André Weil with a series of tentative ideas.
