Michael Harris citations

“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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Michael Harris

Source: Mathematics without Apologies: Portrait of a Problematic Vocation, 2015, p. 26

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

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Michael Harris

Source: Mathematics without Apologies: Portrait of a Problematic Vocation, 2015, p. 24

“Moreover, according to Alexander, the “troubled mathematical martyr,” exemplified not only by Galois but also by Abel, János Bolyai, Riemann, Cantor, Gödel, Turing, John Nash, Grothendieck, Perelman, and even, in a certain sense, Cauchy, remains to this day the dominant image of the “ideal mathematician,” long after the romantic paradigm was exhausted in the arts.”

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Michael Harris

Source: Mathematics without Apologies: Portrait of a Problematic Vocation, 2015, pp. 147-148