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Michael Harris Quotes

born 1954 United States

Michael Howard Harris (born 1954) is an American mathematician who deals with number theory and algebra. He made notable contributions to the Langlands program, for which he (alongside Richard Taylor) won the 2007 Clay Research Award.

United States
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Mathematicians

Random Michael Harris quote

3 quotes

Langlands and Grothendieck are both (at least) Giants by any measure, and both were consciously successors of Galois.

Just as Weil's conjectures were about counting solutions to equations in a situation where the number of solutions is known to be finite, the BSD conjecture concerns the simplest class of polynomial equations—elliptic curves—for which there is no simple way to decide whether the number of solutions is finite or infinite.

Langlands' life has been by no means as extravagant as Grothendieck's, but his romanticism is evident to anyone who reads his prose; the audacity of his program, one of the most elaborate syntheses of conjectures and theorems ever undertaken, has few equivalents in any field of scholarship.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Michael Harris (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.