Abel Prize for 2022: the Abel Prize for the year 2022 has been awarded to American Mathematician Dennis Parnell Sullivan by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Key Highlights:

• This award also includes prize money which amounts to 7 Million NOK (Norwegian Krone).
• He was awarded the prize for his groundbreaking contributions to topology in its broadest sense and in particular its algebraic, geometric and dynamical aspects.

What is Topology?

• Topology is a new field of mathematics that has to do with properties of surfaces that do not change when they are deformed.
• It was born at the end of the 19th century.
• For instance, topologically, a circle and a square are the same; similarly, surfaces of a doughnut and a coffee mug with one handle are topologically equivalent, however, the surface of a sphere and a coffee mug are not equivalent.
• Topology is important in math and various other fields like data economics, science and physics.

About Dennis P. Sullivan:

• Prof. Sullivan is from the City University of New York and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
• He has won numerous awards, among them the Steele Prize, the 2010 Wolf Prize in Mathematics and the 2014 Balzan Prize for Mathematics.
• He is also a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

About Abel Prize:

• The King of Norway presents the Abel Prize.
• It is given annually to an individual who has done a remarkable job in the mathematics field.
• It was established on 23 August 2001.
• This prize has been named after Niels Henrik Abel who was a famous Norwegian mathematician.
• It is directly modeled after the Nobel Prizes.
• Nobel Prize doesn’t have a section for mathematics, though some mathematicians have won this prestigious prize in other fields.
• The Fields Medal is an annual award that is also considered to be the ‘Mathematics Nobel’ but it is only awarded to those individuals who are below the age of 40.
• It is funded by the Norwegian Government.
• The laureates are selected by the Abel Committee, the members of which are appointed by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
• The award ceremony takes place in the Aula of the University of Oslo, where the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded between 1947 and 1989.

Note:

• The Abel Prize was first awarded in 2003 to Jean-Pierre Serre, a French mathematician, for his contribution to algebraic geometry, topology, and number theory.
• In 2007, S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan, who is an Indian-American citizen had won the Abel Prize for his contribution in probability theory and for creating a unified large deviation theory.
• In 2019, Karen Uhlenbeck became the first woman to win the Abel Prize, with the award committee citing "the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics.