For maths-fans out there (and I know there must be at least n of you), the winner of the Abel prize was announced earlier today. Awarded annually by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Abel prize is the Nobel of mathematics.
This year, John Griggs Thompson, of Cambridge and Florida Universities, and Jacques Tits, of the Collège de France, were awarded the Prize "for their profound achievements in algebra and in particular for shaping modern group theory".
Understanding precisely what Thompson did might be tough for us mere maths mortals: the proof he published in 1963, and for which he won this year's Abel, comes in at a staggering 255 pages long. Suffice to say, Thomson and Tits laid down crucial groundwork in understanding the building blocks of symmetry.
Marcus du Sautoy of the University of Oxford, who has just written an excellent book on symmetry, presented the prizes on behalf of the Norwegian Academy. "This award is a celebration of the many people who have contributed to the project," he said. "Thompson and Tits are key figures in a very creative period in mathematics and without their contributions, this work would neither have begun nor been finished."
Back in 1963, Thompson and colleague Walter Feit proved that all objects with an odd number of symmetries can be broken down into objects with a prime number of symmetries. Their proof of the so-called Odd Order Theorem was initially rejected by several prestigious journals. Eventually the Pacific Journal of Mathematics devoted a whole issue to the proof later that year. The proof stunned mathematicians at the time because it had been thought too difficult to tackle.
According to the London Mathematical Society, Tits' work was "complementary to that of Thomson, creating a new and highly influential vision of groups as geometric objects. This geometric approach was essential in the study and realisation of the sporadic groups."
The maths of symmetry, called group theory, is useful in applications such as coding where digital data can be scanned and checked for errors by analysing their inherent symmetry. It has famously been used to check the integrity of data being beamed in from satellites in outer space.
The Abel Prize is worth about €750,000 (or £580,000) to the winners and was established in 2002 by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters for outstanding scientific work in mathematics. The award is named after the 19th century Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel, who was himself a pioneer of group theory, despite only living to 26.
