Abel Prize 2022: Who was mathematician Niels Henrik Abel? All you need to know

On Wednesday, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters will announce the winner of the 2022 Abel Prize, a leading honour in the domain of mathematics. The Abel Prize was founded by the Norwegian Parliament (The Storting) in 2002, on the event of the 200-year anniversary of the birth of Niels Henrik Abel, Norway’s greatest mathematician.

The Abel Prize is awarded by The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, on behalf of the Ministry of Education. The winner of the prize is selected by the Abel Committee, consisting of five top mathematicians from throughout the world. The prize comes with the monetary award of  7.5 million Norwegian Krone (NOK) (approximately Rs 6,51,06,180) along with a statuette depicting Niels Henrik Abel.

According to the official site of Abel Prize, "The Abel Prize supports a number of measures directed towards stimulating the interest in mathematics amongst children and youths. Amongst these mathematics competitions for children and teenagers, and a mathematics teacher prize."

Who is Neils Henrik Abel?

Born on 5 August 1802, Neils Henrik Abel was a Norwegian mathematician, a frontiersperson in the development of several branches of modern mathematics. According to Britannica, soon after Niels Henrik was born, Abel's father, a poor Lutheran preacher, relocated his family to the parish of Gjerstad, near the town of Risr in southeast Norway. Niels enrolled in the cathedral school in Oslo in 1815, and his mathematical ability was recognised in 1817 with the entrance of a new mathematics teacher, Bernt Michael Holmboe, who introduced him to mathematical classics and presented original problems for him to answer. In preparation for his own studies, Abel read the mathematical writings of Sir Isaac Newton (17th century Englishman), Leonhard Euler (18th century German), and his contemporaries Joseph-Louis Lagrange (17th century Frenchman) and Carl Friedrich Gauss (17th century German).

Neils Abel’s first papers, published in 1823, were on functional equations and integrals. In 1826, Abel travelled to Paris, then the world's centre for mathematics, where he met with the world's leading mathematicians and finished a key paper on the theory of algebraic integrals. The key finding of his work, known as Abel's theorem, forms the foundation for the later theory of Abelian integrals and Abelian functions, which is a generalisation of elliptic function theory to functions with multiple variables.

He made his discoveries while living in poverty and died at the age of 26 from tuberculosis. His discovery forms the mathematical foundation for the CT scan. His work is also utilised today in ECC-cryptography, used for encrypting data online.