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

— Michael Harris

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More quotes by Michael Harris

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.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Michael Harris (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.