Laudatio on the occasion of an award to Günter Harder

Author's comments: The following brief discourse was delivered in Erlangen in October, 2004, on the occasion of the award of the Karl Georg Christian von Staudt-Preis to Günter Harder. It does not do justice to his many contributions to mathematics, but does attempt to express my great admiration of him and my great respect for the passion and the tenacity with which he continues to reflect on what seem to me some of the central problems of the modern theory of numbers.

At one or two points in the text there are references to diagrams. The diagrams are hardly necessary for a mathematically experienced reader and are not included.