Robert Phelan Langlands, is a Canadian mathematician. He is best known as the founder of the Langlands program, a vast web of conjectures and results connecting representation theory and automorphic forms to the study of Galois groups in number theory, for which he received the 2018 Abel Prize. He was an emeritus professor and occupied Albert Einstein's office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, until 2020 when he retired.

In harmonic analysis and number theory, an automorphic form is a well-behaved function from a topological group G to the complex numbers which is invariant under the action of a discrete subgroup of the topological group. Automorphic forms are a generalization of the idea of periodic functions in Euclidean space to general topological groups.