Abel Prize 2022: American Dennis Sullivan wins mathematics award for work on topology

Dennis Parnell Sullivan, an American mathematician, has been announced as the winner of the Abel Prize 2022. The award will be given to him on the next day, i.e. March 24, including prize money amounting to 7 Million NOK.

The math genius received the award for his work in topology and its branches, specifically "for his groundbreaking contributions to topology in its broadest sense, and inparticular its algebraic, geometric and dynamical aspects."

Topology is a branch of mathematics that considers two objects of different shapes equivalent if they can be deformed into one another through shrinking, stretching and similar forces, but gluing foreign parts or tearing them apart is not allowed in the study of topology. This stream of mathematics is comparatively new as it was born in the late 19th century. The study of topology has been remarkably important in maths and other fields such as economics, data science and physics. 

"Dennis Parnell Sullivan went on to tackle a host of topological, dynamical and analytic problems, always with the idea of a geometric structure on a space playing a central role. He showed that the topological structure of a manifold of dimension five or more can always be promoted to a Lipschitz structure, allowing analytic methods to be brought to bear. His argument uses arithmetic groups to replace Kirby’s torus with a hyperbolic manifold immersed in Euclidean space. With Simon Donaldson, he proved such structures need not exist in dimension four."

Abel Prize

Abel Prize is an annual prize given annually to a person by the King of Norway, who has done a remarkable job in the field of mathematics. The annual award for mathematics is named after the great Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel. The award is inspired by the famous Nobel Prize. It is pertinent to note that there is no Nobel Prize for mathematics, though some mathematicians have won the prestigious Nobel Prize in different fields other than Mathematics. The Fields Medal is another annual award that is sometimes considered the 'Mathematics Nobel' but is only awarded to those below 40 years of age. 

History of Abel Prize

Sophus Lie, another renowned mathematician, first proposed the Abel Prize in 1899, in an attempt to honour Niels Henrik Abel (born in 1802) on his 100th birth anniversary in 1902. Notably, the award was inspired by the Nansen Fund and Alfred Nobel's plan of an annual award that covers major fields except mathematics.

On 23rd August 2001, during a speech on the Blindern campus of the University of Oslo, then Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg announced that the government would establish an Abel Fund worth NOK 200 million. He emphasised the broad political consensus regarding the proposal and hoped that an annual Abel Prize would strengthen and inspire teaching as well as scientific efforts.

The first Abel Prize was an honorary award to Atle Selberg in 2002, the two-hundredth birth anniversary of Niels Abel. The first actual prize was given in 2003 to French mathematician Jean-Pierre Serre for his contribution to topology, algebraic geometry and number theory.

S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan, an Indian-American citizen, won the Abel Prize in the year 2007 for his valuable contribution in "probability theory and in particular for creating a unified theory of large deviation".