Richard Taylor is one of the leading number theorists of his generation working on the arithmetic theory of automorphic forms. With his collaborators, he proved the modularity of all elliptic curves over Q; the local Langlands conjecture for GL(n); the Sato–Tate conjecture; the potential automorphy of all regular self-dual motives; and the existence of Galois representations for all regular automorphic forms on GL(n) over a number field.

He also helped Andrew Wiles to complete his proof of Fermat’s Last Thoerem. His works can be viewed as some of the major arithmetic achievements related to the remarkable conjectures made by Robert Langlands in the 1970s on the relationship between automorphic forms and the representations of Galois groups. Correspondingly, Richard has won several awards, including the Cole Prize in Number Theory, the Fermat Prize, the Shaw Prize, and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.