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For the first time ever, the Abel Prize has gone to a German—and this one is based at the University of Bonn! Mathematician Professor Gerd Faltings will receive the award in a ceremony in Oslo on May 26, 2026. The accolade has been presented every year since 2003 by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in the presence of the country’s king Harald V. Professor Faltings is a Professor Emeritus of the University of Bonn and a former director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics (MPIM) in the city.
The international award recognizes academic work of extraordinary depth and influence on the mathematical sciences and is thus also regarded as a kind of “Nobel Prize for Mathematics.” Faltings has been active in Bonn since the 1990s, working at the MPIM and the University, and remains an associate member of the latter’s Hausdorff Center for Mathematics (HCM) Cluster of Excellence.
The Abel Prize was set up by the Norwegian government to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel (1802–1829). Unlike with the Fields Medal—but like the Nobel Prize—there are no age restrictions on the winner of the Abel Prize. The award is worth 7.5 million Norwegian kroner (around €670,000).
Gerd Faltings was also the first German to win the Fields Medal, doing so back in 1986. Peter Scholze, another mathematics professor from the University of Bonn, followed in his footsteps in 2018. Celebrating the announcement of his illustrious accolade together with the MPIM team, Faltings said: “I feel honored by this prize.”
Rector Professor Michael Hoch was among the first to congratulate him, commenting: “On behalf of the University of Bonn—a University of Excellence—I’d like to extend my warmest congratulations to Gerd Faltings for this truly unique achievement. He has revolutionized many fields of mathematics, especially number theory, the theory of surfaces and Diophantine equations, and shaped their development with his groundbreaking findings. In the Mordell conjecture, he solved a problem that had stumped mathematicians for decades. I’m especially delighted that the first German Abel Prize is coming to Bonn; it underlines yet again that mathematics at the University of Bonn is among the very best in the world and reflects the outstanding achievements produced here, not least in the HCM Cluster of Excellence.”
Intrigued by mathematics from an early age
Gerd Faltings was born in the Buer district of Gelsenkirchen in 1954. His father held a degree in physics and his mother one in chemistry. While at school, he twice entered the Stifterverband’s nationwide mathematics competition and was accepted into the German Academic Scholarship Foundation as the German champion. After obtaining his Abitur, he studied mathematics and physics in Münster and was a guest at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1978/79. 1979 also saw him take up an assistant position in Münster, where he gained his Habilitation in 1981. This was followed by professorships in Wuppertal and at Princeton University, New Jersey. Faltings returned to Germany in 1994, holding the posts of Director of the MPIM in Bonn and professor in the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the University of Bonn until his acceptance of an emeritus position in 2023.
A multi-award-winning researcher
The first few awards to come his way included the 1984 Dannie Heineman Prize from the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities as well as the 1986 Fields Medal, an accolade that the International Mathematical Union only awards every four years to mathematicians under the age of 40. In Germany, he received the Leibniz Prize in 1996, the von Staudt Prize in 2008, the Heinz Gumin Prize in 2010 and the Georg Cantor Medal in 2017. He has also won international recognition, being awarded the King Faisal International Prize in 2014 and the Shaw Prize one year later.
Faltings is a member of the academies in Düsseldorf, Göttingen, Berlin and Halle as well as the European Academy, the Royal Society in London, the National Academy of Science in Washington and the Order Pour le Mérite.
An unexpected solution to a mathematical riddle
Faltings is being awarded the Abel Prize “for introducing powerful tools into arithmetic geometry and solving the longstanding Mordell and Lang conjectures for Diophantine equations.“ Explaining its decision, the prize committee called him “an outstanding figure in arithmetic geometry. His ideas and findings have shaped the field and found solutions to conjectures that had gone unproven for a long time. He also introduced new methods that influenced subsequent work over a period of several decades. His exceptional achievements have united geometric and arithmetic perspectives and demonstrate the power of profound structural insights.”
Gerd Faltings shot to fame overnight in 1983 when he unexpectedly proved the Mordell conjecture using some completely innovative methods. The idea behind the Mordell conjecture is thousands of years old; even Diophantus of Alexandria, back in the 3rd century CE, wanted to find out how many integer solutions there were to an equation such as a² + b² = c². Now we know that there is an infinite number of them. In the early 20th century, it gradually became clear that the question of whether polynomial equations like these have any integer solutions and, if so, how many depends on a geometric property, specifically the number of “holes” they have (mathematicians talk of the “genus” of a surface). For example, the surface of a sphere has genus 0, a donut with one hole has genus 1, a pretzel has genus 3, and so on.
And the number of integer solutions hinges on the genus of these surfaces, as equations with surfaces of genus 0—the simplest case—will have either an infinite number of rational solutions or none at all. Equations with genus 1, known as elliptic curves, can likewise have an infinite number of solutions, although these can in turn be constructed from a finite number of solutions. In 1922, Louis Mordell conjectured that equations with surfaces of genus greater than 1 can have at most a finite number of rational solutions.
His conjecture stubbornly resisted all attempts at being proven for over 60 years, by which point it had gained a reputation for being unsolvable—that is, until the 28-year-old Faltings astounded the scientific community with his proof, and the Mordell conjecture has been known as Faltings’s theorem ever since. This and many other results of similar significance made him one of the leading minds in arithmetic geometry.
Dr. Christian Blohmann
Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, Bonn
Phone: +49 228 402-302
Email: blohmann@mpim-bonn.mpg.de
2026 Abel Prize Winner: Prof. Dr. Gerd Faltings.
Copyright: Foto: Peter Badge/Typos1
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