Morrey’s conjecture arose from a rather innocent looking question in 1952: is there a local condition characterizing "ellipticity” in the calculus of variations? Morrey was not able to answer the question, and indeed, it took 40 years until first progress was made with V. Sverak’s ingenious counterexample. Nevertheless, the case pertaining to planar maps remains open despite much progress, and has fascinated many through its interesting connections to complex analysis, geometric function theory, harmonic analysis, probability and martingales, differential inclusions and the geometry of matrix space. In the talk, I will give an overview of some of these connections and some of the recent progress.