At 81, he is still an active member of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, where he occupies the office that was once Albert Einstein’s.
The mathematician outlined what became known as the Langlands programme in 1967 and carried out parts of it himself. The programme is a sort of Rosetta stone that allows researchers to translate between different fields of mathematics. That way, a problem that seems unsolvable in one language can become more approachable in the other. And this connection reveals two seemingly different concepts to be two aspects of a deeper truth.