Robert Langdon

Professor Robert Langdon
Prof. Robert Langdon portrayed by Tom Hanks in Angels & Demons
First appearance	Angels & Demons (novel)
Last appearance	Inferno (film)
Created by	Dan Brown
Portrayed by	Tom Hanks Robert Clotworthy (video game)
Information
Gender	Male
Occupation	Professor of Religious Iconology and Symbology at Harvard University
Title	Professor
Family	Unnamed father (deceased)
Relatives	Howard Langdon (great-grandfather)

Professor Robert Langdon is a fictional character created by author Dan Brown for his novels Angels & Demons (2000), The Da Vinci Code (2003), The Lost Symbol (2009), and Inferno (2013). He is a Harvard University professor of religious iconology and symbology (a fictional field related to the study of historic symbols, which is not methodologically connected to the actual discipline of semiotics).

Tom Hanks portrays Langdon in the Robert Langdon film series, starting with the 2006 film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, reprising the role in the 2009 film adaptation of Angels & Demons, and again in the 2016 film adaptation of Inferno.

Dan Brown created the character as a fictional alter ego of himself or "the man he wishes he could be". Brown himself was born June 22, 1964 in Exeter, New Hampshire, and the fictional Langdon is described as having been born on June 22, also in Exeter, and attending the same school as Brown did, Phillips Exeter Academy. Initially it is established that Langdon is a successful scholar who Brown named after John Langdon, a professor of typography at Drexel University who is known for his creation of ambigrams. An example of Langdon's ambigrams appeared on the cover of the first edition of Brown’s novel Angels & Demons, and other ambigrams featured throughout that novel were also designed by Langdon. On the acknowledgments page, Brown calls Langdon "one of the most ingenious and gifted artists alive … who rose brilliantly to my impossible challenge and created the ambigrams for this novel". John Langdon also created the logo for the fictional Depository Bank of Zurich, which appears in The Da Vinci Code film.