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Module 2 · The Abel Prize

The Abel Prize

The Abel Prize is awarded annually by the King of Norway to a mathematician of any age whose body of work is judged to have had outstanding influence on the discipline. Often called “the Nobel Prize for mathematics”, it carries a purse of 7.5 million NOK (approximately US$700,000), comparable to a Nobel.

Laureate Roll Call

  • 2003 — Jean-Pierre Serre (France). Inaugural laureate. For shaping the modern form of many parts of mathematics: topology, algebraic geometry, number theory.
  • 2004 — Michael Atiyah & Isadore Singer (UK / USA). Atiyah–Singer index theorem (1963).
  • 2005 — Peter Lax (USA / Hungary). Theory and application of partial differential equations.
  • 2006 — Lennart Carleson (Sweden). Harmonic analysis, including the resolution of the Lusin conjecture on Fourier series convergence.
  • 2007 — S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan (USA / India). Probability theory, large deviations.
  • 2008 — John Thompson & Jacques Tits (USA / Belgium). Group theory; classification of finite simple groups; Tits buildings.
  • 2009 — Mikhail Gromov (France / Russia). Geometric ideas across mathematics; geometric group theory.
  • 2010 — John Tate (USA). Number theory: Tate cohomology, Tate’s thesis, Tate modules.
  • 2011 — John Milnor (USA). Discoveries in topology, geometry, and algebra — including exotic 7-spheres.
  • 2012 — Endre Szemerédi (Hungary / USA). Discrete mathematics; Szemerédi’s theorem on arithmetic progressions.
  • 2013 — Pierre Deligne (Belgium). Algebraic geometry; the Weil conjectures (final case proven 1974), perverse sheaves, mixed Hodge theory.
  • 2014 — Yakov Sinai (Russia / USA). Dynamical systems, ergodic theory, mathematical physics.
  • 2015 — John Nash & Louis Nirenberg (USA). Nonlinear PDE. Nash died in a car accident days after the ceremony.
  • 2016 — Andrew Wiles (UK). Proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem (1994–5).
  • 2017 — Yves Meyer (France). Wavelet theory.
  • 2018 — Robert Langlands (Canada / USA). The Langlands programme — a vast unifying vision linking number theory and representation theory.
  • 2019 — Karen Uhlenbeck (USA). Geometric analysis, gauge theory; the first woman to win the Abel.
  • 2020 — Hillel Furstenberg & Gregory Margulis (Israel / Russia). Probabilistic methods in dynamics, group theory, NT.
  • 2021 — László Lovász & Avi Wigderson (Hungary / Israel). Theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics.
  • 2022 — Dennis Sullivan (USA). Topology, especially algebraic, geometric, and dynamical aspects.
  • 2023 — Luis Caffarelli (Argentina / USA). Regularity for nonlinear PDEs and free-boundary problems.
  • 2024 — Michel Talagrand (France). Probability and stochastic analysis — concentration of measure, suprema of stochastic processes, mean-field models.
  • 2025 — Masaki Kashiwara (Japan). D-modules, microlocal analysis, crystal bases — foundational contributions to algebraic analysis.

Patterns

  • Lifetime achievement — the prize tends to recognise long bodies of work, often a single deep idea elaborated for decades (Tate’s arithmetic, Milnor’s topology, Langlands’ programme).
  • Algebra and analysis are roughly balanced, with strong showings from PDE (Lax, Nirenberg, Caffarelli), number theory (Tate, Wiles, Deligne, Langlands), and geometry/topology (Milnor, Gromov, Sullivan).
  • One woman has received the Abel: Karen Uhlenbeck (2019).
  • Shared awards are common, in striking contrast to the Fields Medal’s individual recognition.
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