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Abel Prize 2022 has been awarded to Professor Dennis Parnell Sullivan.
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He was awarded the prize “For his groundbreaking contributions to topology in its broadest sense, and in particular its algebraic, geometric and dynamical aspects.”
About Abel Prize
- The Abel Prize is awarded annually to outstanding mathematicians. It was established by the Norwegian Government in 2002, and is managed by The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
- The Fields Medal and the Abel Prize are the two important international prizes for mathematics.
- While the Fields Medal honours brilliant work done by a mathematician below the age of forty years, the Abel Prize has no age limit and is more of a lifetime achievement award celebrating important contributions made to a field of mathematics.
- The first Abel Prize, awarded in 2003, went to French mathematician Jean-Pierre Serre. The only person of Indian origin to have won this prize is Srinivasa S.R. Varadhan. He is at the Courant Institute, New York University, and won it in 2007.
- So far, the prize has gone to only one woman mathematician, Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck of University of Texas, U.S.A.
- The prize consists of a citation and a prize money of 7.5 million Norwegian Kroner.
Norway’s Ramanujan
- A short film on the tragic story of mathematician Niels Henrik Abel is available on the website of the Abel Prize. Indian math afficionados will see the parallel to the life of Ramanujan.
- Abel was a young genius who, when he was just 22, showed the unsolvability of the quintic equation, which had puzzled mathematicians for 250 years.
- Now, his discovery forms the mathematical basis for the CT scan. His work is also used today in ECC-cryptography, used for encrypting data online.
About Fields Medal
- The Fields Medal is a prize awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians under 40 years of age at the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), a meeting that takes place every four years.
- The Fields Medal is regarded as one of the highest honors a mathematician can receive, and has been described as the Nobel Prize of Mathematics, although there are several differences, including frequency of award, number of awards, and age limits.
Reference:
https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/abel-prize-to-be-declared-today/article65251584.ece
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