Oslo: The renowned Abel Prize for mathematics was on Thursday awarded to Gerd Faltings, a German specialist in arithmetic geometry, a branch of mathematics that studies geometric shapes defined by equations.
“Gerd Faltings is a towering figure in arithmetic geometry,” the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters said in a statement.
“His ideas and results have reshaped the field, settling major long-standing conjectures, while also establishing new frameworks that have guided decades of subsequent work,” it added.
A former director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, 71-year-old Faltings also won the prestigious Fields Medal in 1986 for his proof of the Mordell conjecture.
In 1983, he proved a conjecture formulated by British mathematician Louis Mordell in the 1920s.
It asserts that certain complex algebraic curves only have a finite number of rational solutions, but it remained unproven for more than six decades.
Named after the Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel (1802-1829), the Abel Prize was created by Norway’s government, partly in a bid to compensate for the lack of a Nobel prize in mathematics.
It comes with a medal and a monetary award of 7.5 million kroner ($774,000), and Faltings will receive his prize in Oslo on May 26.
Last year, the Abel Prize went to Japanese mathematician Masaki Kashiwara.
