2021 Abel Prize: László Lovász and Avi Wigderson

The 2021 Abel Prize goes to to mathematician László Lovász and computer scientist Avi Wigderson "for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics."

Yves Meyer Wins 2017 Abel Prize!

Yves Meyer has won the 2017 Abel Prize for his work on the theory of wavelets. Here is an article in Nature about it.

I am puzzled as to why Ingrid Daubechies didn't share this prize.

Update: Terry Tao has written a short blog post about the prize. Among other things (and I hadn't caught this), note the following text from Tao: Daubechies also made extremely important contributions to the theory of wavelets, but my understanding is that due to a conflict of interest arising from Daubechies’ presidency of the International Mathematical Union (which nominates members of the Abel prize committee) from 2011 to 2014, she was not eligible for the prize this year, and so I do not think this prize should be necessarily construed as a judgement on the relative contributions of Meyer and Daubechies to this field.

Andrew Wiles Wins 2016 Abel Prize

The home team won big today: my Mathematical Institute colleague Andrew Wiles has won the 2016 Abel Prize!

RIP John Nash (1928–2015)

Mathematician John Nash and his wife were killed yesterday in a taxi accident.

Nash won the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for the work in his 27-page PhD thesis that invented the theory of non-cooperative games. Not bad. (As Joe Jewell pointed out, Nash's thesis also only has 2 references.)

Nash had recently accepted his Abel Prize (the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel Prize) for entirely different work.

Sylvia Nasar's 1994 article about John Nash, which is based on her book, is a fascinating read. Nasar's book formed the basis for the movie A Beautiful Mind.

Nash is also one of the people who invented the game Hex.

If you want to read more about Nash, go to FAQ maintained by Princeton University.

(Tip of the cap to numerous people, and thanks to Carlos Castillo Chávez for posting the article by Sylvia Nasar.)

Update (5/26/15): As I suspected, this was the final leg of their journey home after Nash was in Norway to receive his Abel Prize.

Update (5/29/15): Here is an article in the popular press about Nash's work on isometric embeddings.

John Nash and Louis Nirenberg Share 2015 Abel Prize

John Nash and Louis Nirenberg have been jointly awarded the 2015 Abel Prize for their work on partial differential equations.

(Tip of the cap to Physics Today for their post on Facebook.)