- The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has awarded Abel Prize 2019 — an award modeled on the Nobel Prizes — to Karen Uhlenbeck, an emeritus professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the first women to receive this award.
- She has been awarded for “the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics.”
- One of Dr. Uhlenbeck’s advances in essence described the complex shapes of soap films not in a bubble bath but in abstract, high-dimensional curved spaces. In later work, she helped put a rigorous mathematical underpinning to techniques widely used by physicists in quantum field theory to describe fundamental interactions between particles and forces.
- In the process, she helped pioneer a field known as geometric analysis, and she developed techniques now commonly used by many mathematicians.
- 76 years old Dr. Uhlenbeck is a visiting associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
- With award, she has been given $700,000 as a cash prize.
- There is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, and for decades, the most prestigious awards in math were the Fields Medals, awarded in small batches every four years to the most accomplished mathematicians who are 40 or younger. Maryam Mirzakhani, in 2014, is the only woman to receive a Fields Medal.
- The Abel, named after the Norwegian mathematician Niels Hendrik Abel, is set up more like the Nobels. Since 2003, it has been given out annually to highlight important advances in mathematics.
- The previous 19 laureates — in three years, the prize was split between two mathematicians — were men, including Andrew J. Wiles, who proved Fermat’s last theorem and is now at the University of Oxford; Peter D. Lax of New York University; and John F. Nash Jr., whose life was portrayed in the movie “A Beautiful Mind.”
(Source: Kenneth Chang, New York Times)
