Bundesministerium für Forschung, Technologie und Raumfahrt
World leader in mathematics
Prof. Dr. Gerd Faltings will be the first German to receive the Abel Prize in 2026.
Bundesministerium für Forschung, Technologie und Raumfahrt:
World leader in mathematics: Prof. Dr. Gerd Faltings will be the first German to receive the Abel Prize in 2026. There is no Nobel Prize for mathematics, but the Abel Prize is considered equivalent: It is awarded in May in Oslo by the Norwegian Crown Prince and is endowed with 670,000 euros.
Faltings has been awarded the prize by the Norwegian Academy of Sciences for his achievements in arithmetic geometry: for "introducing powerful tools and solving long-standing (...) conjectures by Mordell and Lang." Our community will know what that means! The prize committee acknowledges that Faltings' ideas and results have had a groundbreaking impact on the field.
The award didn't come out of nowhere: Faltings became a professor of mathematics in 1982 at the age of 27. Just a few years later, in 1986, he became the first German to receive the Fields Medal, one of the highest honors in mathematics alongside the Abel Prize. Faltings succeeded in providing the mathematical proof of Mordell's so-called conjecture, which had baffled the mathematical community for 60 years. In addition to many other major prizes, he received another prestigious award in 1996: the Leibniz Prize.
The BMFTR extends its warmest congratulations on this extraordinary and well-deserved honor! A strong signal for the excellence of mathematical research in Germany.
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