Module 3 · In Their Own Words
Laureate Interviews
The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Abel Prize Committee traditionally produce a long-form interview with each laureate around the time of the ceremony. These conversations — often an hour or more — let the mathematician tell their own story: how they came to the field, what they consider their best work, who shaped them, and what they advise the next generation. They are some of the richest pieces of contemporary mathematical biography we have.
Yakov Sinai — Abel Prize 2014
Yakov Grigorevich Sinai (born 1935, Moscow) received the 2014 Abel Prize “for his fundamental contributions to dynamical systems, ergodic theory, and mathematical physics.” A student of A. N. Kolmogorov, Sinai introduced the Kolmogorov–Sinai entropy, the Sinai billiard as a model dynamical system, and developed the rigorous mathematical theory of hyperbolic dynamics, Markov partitions, Gibbs measures, and the renormalisation-group approach to phase transitions. His students — among them Margulis, Pesin, Bunimovich, Khanin, and Bufetov — populated leading departments worldwide.
Yakov Sinai — The Abel Prize Interview 2014
A long-form conversation with the 2014 laureate on dynamical systems, mathematical physics, the Moscow school, and his teacher Kolmogorov.
Among the topics Sinai discusses: his arrival at Moscow State, the influence of Kolmogorov, the “Sinai billiard” problem and how it grew out of Boltzmann’s ergodic hypothesis, the Russian school’s style of mathematics, and the difficulty of conveying advanced mathematics to students.
Pierre Deligne — Abel Prize 2013
Pierre Deligne (born 1944, Brussels) received the 2013 Abel Prize “for seminal contributions to algebraic geometry and for their transformative impact on number theory, representation theory, and related fields.” A student and close collaborator of Alexander Grothendieck, Deligne completed the proof of the Weil conjectures in 1974 by establishing the analogue of the Riemann hypothesis for varieties over finite fields, building on Grothendieck’s étale cohomology and using ideas from Hadamard, Lefschetz, and the structure of monodromy. He has also contributed foundational work in mixed Hodge theory, perverse sheaves, the theory of motives, and motivic Galois groups.
Pierre Deligne — The Abel Prize Interview 2013
The 2013 laureate reflects on the IHÉS years with Grothendieck, the proof of the Weil conjectures, and the role of conjecture in mathematics.
Deligne speaks about his early education in Brussels, his arrival at IHÉS and what working with Grothendieck was like, the climate that produced the proofs of the Weil conjectures, the Bourbaki seminar tradition, and the qualities he values in a mathematician — including a stoic willingness to abandon one’s favourite ideas when the evidence runs against them.
Mikhail Gromov — Abel Prize 2009
Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov (born 1943, Boksitogorsk) received the 2009 Abel Prize “for his revolutionary contributions to geometry.” A founder of geometric group theory and a pioneer of metric measure spaces, Gromov introduced almost-flat manifolds, hyperbolic groups, the h-principle for partial differential relations, symplectic capacities and pseudo-holomorphic curves, and the polynomial-growth theorem for finitely generated groups. Beyond pure mathematics, he has long argued for the relevance of mathematical structure to biology — the subject of the lecture series embedded below.
Gromov — The Beauty of Life seen through the Keyhole of Mathematics (4-part lecture)
Part 1/4 — The Beauty of Life through Mathematics
Part 2/4 — The Beauty of Life through Mathematics
Part 3/4 — The Beauty of Life through Mathematics
Part 4/4 — The Beauty of Life through Mathematics
Gromov on evolution and selection
Mathematics behind massive artificial evolution / selection processes
Gromov develops a mathematical vocabulary for the structure of evolutionary and selection processes — ergodic theory, large numbers, and information — in a single self-contained lecture.
Gromov’s “Beauty of Life” talks are unusual: instead of presenting theorems, he asks what the right mathematical objects might be for understanding cells, genomes, and the evolution that produced them. He proposes that the keyhole through which mathematics views biology is narrow, but the view it affords (the geometry of high-dimensional spaces, the ergodicity of evolutionary dynamics, the role of information) is genuinely instructive. The lectures are a good companion to theBiogeometry course on this site.
The Complete Abel Prize Interview Archive (2003–2025)
Every Abel laureate from 2003 onward sits for a long-form interview with the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters — conducted in recent years by Christian Skau, Martin Raüssen, and Bjørn Ian Dundas. The archive below collects them in chronological order. Where 2015 had two laureates (Nash and Nirenberg) and 2020 had two (Furstenberg and Margulis), each interview is shown separately. The Sinai, Deligne, and Gromov entries are also featured in detail above.
2003–2009
Jean-Pierre Serre — Abel 2003 (inaugural)
Shaped the modern form of many parts of mathematics: sheaf cohomology, the homotopy of spheres, étale cohomology with Grothendieck, and a foundational treatment of local fields and l-adic representations.
Michael Atiyah & Isadore Singer — Abel 2004
The Atiyah–Singer index theorem (1963): the analytic index of an elliptic operator equals a topological invariant. Unifies Riemann–Roch, Hirzebruch signature, and Gauss–Bonnet, and underpins gauge theory and string theory.
Peter Lax — Abel 2005
Theory and application of partial differential equations. Lax pairs (the algebraic device behind integrable systems), the Lax–Milgram theorem, and shock-wave theory for hyperbolic conservation laws.
Lennart Carleson — Abel 2006
Harmonic analysis. Resolved the Lusin conjecture (1966): the Fourier series of any L² function converges almost everywhere. Carleson measures and the corona theorem are also his.
S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan — Abel 2007
Probability theory and the unified theory of large deviations. Varadhan’s lemma quantifies the exponential rate at which rare events become unlikely — foundational for statistical mechanics, queueing theory, and finance.
John Thompson & Jacques Tits — Abel 2008
Group theory. Thompson’s odd-order theorem and N-group classification were pillars of the classification of finite simple groups. Tits’s buildings and BN-pairs gave a unified geometric framework for groups of Lie type.
Mikhail Gromov — Abel 2009 (interview)
Revolutionary contributions to geometry: almost-flat manifolds, polynomial-growth groups, hyperbolic groups, the h-principle for partial differential relations, and pseudo-holomorphic curves in symplectic geometry.
2010–2014
John Tate — Abel 2010
Algebraic number theory. Tate’s thesis recast Hecke L-functions in adelic language; Tate cohomology, Tate modules, and p-divisible groups are now permanent vocabulary in arithmetic geometry.
John Milnor — Abel 2011
Discoveries in topology, geometry, and algebra. Exotic 7-spheres (1956), K-theory, the Milnor conjecture (proved by Voevodsky), holomorphic dynamics, and a celebrated style of mathematical exposition.
Endre Szemerédi — Abel 2012
Discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science. Szemerédi’s theorem (every set of integers of positive density contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions) and the Szemerédi regularity lemma.
Pierre Deligne — Abel 2013
Algebraic geometry. Completed the proof of the Weil conjectures (1974) by establishing the Riemann hypothesis for varieties over finite fields. Mixed Hodge theory, perverse sheaves, motivic Galois groups.
Yakov Sinai — Abel 2014
Dynamical systems and ergodic theory. Kolmogorov–Sinai entropy, Sinai billiards as a model of hyperbolic dynamics, Markov partitions, Gibbs measures, and the renormalisation-group approach to phase transitions.
2015–2019
Louis Nirenberg — Abel 2015
Nonlinear PDEs. Existence and regularity theory for the Monge–Ampère equation, the Gagliardo–Nirenberg interpolation inequalities, and (with John) BMO and the John–Nirenberg inequality.
John Nash — Abel 2015
Nonlinear PDEs and geometry. Isometric embedding theorems for Riemannian manifolds (1954, 1956) and breakthrough regularity results for elliptic and parabolic equations — alongside his Nobel-winning work on game theory.
Andrew Wiles — Abel 2016
Proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem (1995). Established the modularity theorem for semistable elliptic curves over the rationals — a tour de force of modern number theory bringing together Galois representations and modular forms.
Yves Meyer — Abel 2017
Wavelet theory. Constructed the first orthonormal wavelet bases (with Lemarié) and developed the multiresolution-analysis framework that underlies modern signal processing, JPEG-2000, and harmonic analysis on quasicrystals.
Robert Langlands — Abel 2018
The Langlands programme — a sweeping web of conjectures relating Galois representations to automorphic forms, generalising both class-field theory and the Eichler–Shimura–Deligne theorem. The central organising principle of much of modern number theory.
Karen Uhlenbeck — Abel 2019
Geometric analysis and gauge theory. Bubble-compactness for harmonic maps, removable-singularity theorems for Yang–Mills connections, foundational work on minimal surfaces. The first woman to win the Abel Prize.
2020–2025
Hillel Furstenberg — Abel 2020
Probabilistic and dynamical methods in number theory. Ergodic-theoretic proof of Szemerédi’s theorem (the Furstenberg correspondence principle) and Furstenberg boundaries in the theory of random walks on groups.
Gregory Margulis — Abel 2020
Lie groups and discrete subgroups. Arithmeticity and superrigidity of lattices in higher-rank Lie groups; the first explicit construction of expander graphs (Margulis 1973) using Kazhdan’s property (T).
Avi Wigderson & László Lovász — Abel 2021
Theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics. Lovász: the LLL lattice-reduction algorithm, the Lovász local lemma, perfect-graph theory. Wigderson: derandomisation, hardness vs randomness, zero-knowledge proofs, complexity theory.
Dennis Sullivan — Abel 2022
Topology and dynamical systems. Rational homotopy theory and the Sullivan minimal model; the no-wandering-domains theorem in complex dynamics; localisation at primes; foundational work in geometric topology.
Michel Talagrand — Abel 2024 (with Dundas & Skau)
Probability and stochastic analysis. Concentration of measure (the Talagrand inequality), generic chaining for suprema of stochastic processes, and a deep mathematical theory of mean-field spin glasses.
Masaki Kashiwara — Abel 2025 (with Dundas & Skau)
Algebraic analysis. D-modules and microlocal analysis with Sato; the Riemann–Hilbert correspondence; crystal bases for quantum groups, with applications across representation theory and mathematical physics.
Source: The Abel Prize — YouTube channel of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters; mirrored at abelprize.no. The 2023 (Caffarelli) interview is not yet present in this archive.
Beyond the Abel Archive
For Fields Medallists, the Notices of the AMS publishes laudations and interviews after each ICM, and the ICM laureates’ lectures are recorded on the official IMU video channel. Quanta Magazine (Erica Klarreich’s pieces) and the Bulletin of the AMS are also rich sources of mathematical biography that can complement the formal interviews.