Abel Prize Research Articles

Nash and Nirenberg Awarded Abel Prize

Nash and Nirenberg Awarded Abel Prize

'Beautiful mind' John Nash adds Abel Prize to his Nobel

Mathematician made famous by Hollywood will share US$765,000 award with Louis Nirenberg for work in the field of geometric analysis.

Russian Mathematician Wins the 2014 Abel Prize

Recognition of the highly respected and influential mathematician Yakov Grigorievich Sinai, winner of the 2014 Abel Prize. The Abel Prize is awarded annually by the Norweigian Academy of Sciences for outstanding scientific work in the field of mathematics.

The Abel Prize award to Ya. G. Sinai

The Abel Prize award to Ya. G. Sinai

Newsmakers

Neuroscientist Huda Zoghbi wins the March of Dimes' developmental biology prize, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters selects Princeton mathematician Yakov Sinai for its Abel Prize in mathematics, and theoretical physicist William Goldstein takes the helm at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Chaos-theory pioneer nabs Abel Prize

Chaos-theory pioneer nabs Abel Prize

The Abel Prize: The Missing Nobel in Mathematics?

The Norwegian government created the Abel Prize in Mathematics in 2002 in memory of mathematician Niels Henrik Abel (1802–1829). The aim was to establish the annual Abel Prize as the world's leading prize in mathematics. The creation of the prize was the result of a short and successful campaign in the spring and summer of 2001, which presented the prize as ‘the missing Nobel Prize in mathematics.’ The prize was very well received, both by the international mathematical community and Norwegian politicians. Sweden's Nobel Foundation, however, found repeated references to the new prize as ‘a Nobel in mathematics’ to be quite inappropriate. This article focuses on how the prize was successfully established in Norway, a country considered by some to be at the mathematical periphery, and to what extent the Abel Prize has been able to live up to the high expectations during its first 10 years.

Newsmakers

Jon Lorsch, a biochemist at Johns Hopkins University, will become director of the $2.4 billion National Institute of General Medical Sciences in August, and Pierre Deligne has won this year's Abel Prize for outstanding work in mathematics.

Mathematician wins award for shaping algebra

2013 Abel Prize goes to Belgian Pierre Deligne, who proved a deep conjecture about algebra and geometry.

Deligne Awarded 2013 Abel Prize

Deligne Awarded 2013 Abel Prize

Szemerédi Receives 2012 Abel Prize

Szemerédi Receives 2012 Abel Prize

Newsmakers

This week's Newsmakers are Endre Szemerédi of Rutgers University and the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics in Hungary, who has received the 2012 Abel Prize for mathematics, and Dartmouth College president and global health expert Jim Yong Kim, who has been nominated to head the World Bank.

Mathematically Significant: A Review of Awards in Mathematics with Emphasis on the Fields Medal

There are several major international awards in the field of mathematics. Arguably the most prestigious of these is the Fields Medal, which has been awarded to fifty-one mathematicians since 1936. This article will examine aspects of the Fields Medal winners such as age, nationality, affiliated institution upon award, area of work, and the impact of their publications in the mathematics literature. MathSciNet author profiles were examined to collect both publication and citation data for this study. Several other awards in mathematics, including the Wolf Prize, Abel Prize, and Kyoto Prize, are also discussed.

Newsmakers

This week's Newsmakers are Cornell ecologist and evolutionary biologist Thomas Eisner, who died last week at age 81 of complications from Parkinson's disease; topologist and dynamical systems theorist John Milnor, who has won the 2011 Abel Prize in mathematics; entomologist May Berenbaum, who will receive the 2011 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement; and physical chemist Bai Chunli, who was appointed president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences last month.

Maths behind Internet encryption wins top award

Abel prize awarded to number theorist John Tate.

Groups and Geometries

The workshop Groups and Geometries was one of a series of Oberwolfach workshops on this topic which has taken place every 3 years for some time. It focused on algebraic and finite groups, their interactions with the geometry of buildings, and applications. A particular highlight of the meeting was a celebration of the recent award of the Abel Prize jointly to John Thompson and Jacques Tits, two of the great pioneers of modern group theory and geometry, and both leading participants at many Oberwolfach meetings. The celebration took the form of two special lectures, given on the Tuesday evening. In the first, Bernd Fischer gave some personal recollections about Thompson, and spoke about his enormous influence on the development of finite group theory. The second lecture was given by Richard Weiss, who described some of the revolutionary innovations of Tits in the geometrical aspects of group theory, and also told some stories illustrating how Tits inspired people through his warmth and sense of humour. There were 45 participants and 26 talks. These were on three main inter-related themes: buildings and their relationship with algebraic groups; structure of finite groups; and applications. Particularly pleasing was the participation of a substantial number (more than 10) of young researchers, several of whom – Alice Devillers, Silvia Onofrei, Rebecca Waldecker, Pierre-Emmanuel Caprace, Ralf Gramlich, Harald Helfgott and Nikolay Nikolov – gave talks. This demonstrates the attractiveness of the field. The conference showed that the theories of buildings, algebraic groups, and finite simple groups and their geometries are very active areas with a great deal of interaction between them and also with other areas. People from these different areas were brought together, and their interaction was indeed very lively. The conference stands in the tradition of very successful meetings on Groups and Geometries at Oberwolfach.

NYU mathemetician Mikhail Gromov named winner of Abel Prize

NYU mathemetician Mikhail Gromov named winner of Abel Prize

Large deviations: An introduction to 2007 Abel prize

2007 Abel prize has been awarded to S R S Varadhan for creating a unified theory of large deviations. We attempt to give a flavour of this branch of probability theory, highlighting the role of Varadhan.

A Conversation with S. R. S. Varadhan

S. R. S. Varadhan was awarded the Abel Prize for the year 2007. I met him on 14 and 15 May—one week before the prize ceremony in Oslo—in his office at the Courant Institute to interview him for the Mathematical Intelligencer. My qualifications to interview him were that he and I are Ph.D.’s from the same institute, my Varadhan number is 2, and his was the first research talk that I attended as a graduate student. My major disqualification was that I know little of probability, and I felt like someone destitute of geometry daring to enter Plato’s Academy. Though we had planned to talk for two or three hours, our conversation was spread over nearly eight hours. What follows is the record of this with very minor editing. To help the reader I have added a few “box items” that explain some of the mathematical ideas alluded to in the conversation.

The Abel Prize

On March 22, 2007, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters decided to award the Abel Prize for 2007 to Professor S. R. S. Varadhan, the outstanding mathematician and member of the Advisory Board of our journal, for his fundamental contributions to probability theory, and in particular for creating a unified theory of large deviation.