The Fields Medal and the Abel Prize are two of the most prestigious international mathematics awards. While the Fields Medal recognises outstanding work by a mathematician under the age of forty, the Abel Prize is more of a career achievement award for significant contributions to an area of mathematics.
The recipient of the 2022 Abel Prize, the highest award in mathematics, was announced by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Dennis Parnell Sullivan, a mathematician at the City University of New York’s Graduate School and University Center, has won the Abel Prize for 2022.
According to the citation, “for his revolutionary contributions to topology in its broadest sense, and in particular its algebraic, geometric, and dynamical aspects.” Topology is a branch of mathematics that dates from the nineteenth century and is concerned with the properties of surfaces that do not change when distorted.
A circle and a square are topologically identical, as are the surfaces of a doughnut and a coffee mug with one handle. However, the surfaces of a sphere and a coffee mug are not.
Changed the landscape of topology
In a press release issued by the Academy, Hans Munthe-Kaas, chair of the Abel Committee, says,
“Dennis P. Sullivan has repeatedly changed the landscape of topology by introducing new concepts, proving landmark theorems, answering old conjectures, and formulating new problems that have driven the field forward.”
According to the press release, Prof. Sullivan has discovered deep linkages between a variety of fields of mathematics. One of his major achievements is the development of a novel approach to rational homotopy theory, a subject of algebraic topology.
Later, in the late 1970s, he went on to dynamical systems, an area that was thought to be unrelated to algebraic topology. The study of a point moving in geometrical space is known as dynamical systems.
He and his partner, Moira Chas, found a novel invariant for a manifold based on loops in 1999, launching the discipline of string topology. Dennis P. Sullivan has received various honors, including the Steele Prize, the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 2010, and the Balzan Prize in Mathematics in 2014.
He is also an American Mathematical Society fellow.
Abel prize’s History
The Abel Prize is named after Niels Henrik Abel, a Norwegian mathematician. In 2002, the prize was established to honour his 200th birthday. In 2003, the inaugural Abel Prize was given to French mathematician Jean-Pierre Serre. Srinivasa S.R. Varadhan is the only person of Indian descent to have earned this award.
He got it in 2007 while at New York University’s Courant Institute. Only one woman mathematician has won the prize thus far: Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck of the University of Texas in the United States. The prize includes a citation as well as a monetary award of 7.5 million Norwegian Kroners.
Ramanujan of Norway
On the Abel Prize website, there is a short film on the terrible story of the mathematician Niels Henrik Abel. The parallel to Ramanujan’s life will be obvious to Indian mathematicians. Abel was a young genius who demonstrated the unsolvability of the quintic problem, which had perplexed mathematicians for 250 years, when he was just 22 years old.
He presented an important theorem in Paris in 1826, but the manuscript was lost. He caught tuberculosis while attempting to recover his lost treatise and died three years later, on April 6, 1829, at the age of 26.
The Paris treatise was discovered just two days after his death. His discovery now serves as the mathematical foundation for the CT scan. His technique is still utilised in ECC-cryptography, which is used to encrypt data on the internet.
Published by – Kiruthiga K
Edited by – Kritika Kashyap
