Abel Prize awarded to John Willard Milnor

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has chosen one of the living legends of mathematics, John Willard Milnor of the Institute for Mathematical Sciences in the University of Stony Brook, U.S.A, for the award of its prestigious Abel Prize for the year 2011.

This was announced on Wednesday in Oslo by Norwegian Academy president Øyvind Østerud. Professor Milnor will receive the Prize from His Majesty King Harald at an award ceremony in Oslo on May 24, 2011. The award carries 6 million Norwegian Kroner (approx. €750,000 or $1 m.)

The Prize is given in recognition of contributions of extraordinary depth and influence to mathematical sciences and has been awarded annually since 2003. The Prize is named after the great Norwegian mathematical genius, Niels Henrik Abel (1802-29), often compared with the Indian wizard Srinivasa Ramanujan, who died at a very young age of 26.

The past winners include such illustrious names as Jean-Pierre Serr (2003), Sir Michael Atiyah and Isadore M. Singer (2004), Peter D. Lax (2005), Lennart Carleson (2006), Srinivasa S. R. Varadhan (2007), John Griggs Thompson and Jacques Tits (2008), Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov (2009) and John Torrence Tate (2010).

The 2011 award is being given to Professor Milnor, as the citation notes, “for [his] pioneering discoveries in topology, geometry and algebra.” He has even made significant contributions in number theory.

Major awards

Professor Milnor has received all the major awards in Mathematics: He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1962, the Wolf Prize in 1989 and is the only person to have won all the three Steele Prizes of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) in 1982, 2004 and early this year for seminal contribution to research, for mathematical exposition and for lifetime achievement respectively. He also received the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1967.