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A French-Russian mathematician has won the Abel Prize today for his work on advanced forms of geometry. The winner of the 6 million Norwegian kroner (US$920,000) prize, Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov, has held a permanent appointment at the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES) outside Paris since 1982. The Abel committee cited Gromov specifically for his contributions to three sub-disciplines of modern geometry: the study of Riemannian space, symplectic geometry, and groups of polynomial growth. Gromov is "renowned among mathematicians for his original approach", says Ian Stewart, a mathematician at the University of Warwick in Coventry. Among other things, modern geometers...

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters awarded its Abel Prize in mathematics to an American professor at New York University on Thursday. The prize honors the memory of Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel. Peter D Lax, age 78, won the prize "for his groundbreaking contributions to the theory and application of partial differential equations and to the computation of their solutions," according to the academy. The Hungarian-born professor has been called the most versatile mathematician of his generation. The academy said he has had "a profound influence" through his research, writings, a lifelong commitment to education and generosity to...