ON TUESDAY afternoon at the University of Oslo, King Harald V of Norway presented the very first Abel Prize in Mathematics to Jean-Pierre Serre of the Coll猫ge de France in Paris. The Abel Prize is intended to finally fill the gap left by Alfred Nobel, who chose to ignore maths when he established the Nobel prizes.
鈥淚 think the absence of a Nobel prize has lessened the perception of maths among the general public,鈥� says John Ball of the University of Oxford, a member of the prize committee. There are already several international maths prizes, including the prestigious Fields Medal, which is often said to have the same cachet as a Nobel. But the Fields Medal has not caught the public imagination in the same way. Perhaps because it is only awarded every four years, or because the cash involved is only CAN$15,000 ($11,000), meagre compared with the money that goes with a Nobel.
The Abel Prize, on the other hand, will be awarded every year, and Serre is walking off with a handy $816,000. 鈥淚t will enhance the visibility of mathematics and heighten the esteem in which mathematics is held,鈥� explained Rolf Jeltsch, president of the European Mathematical Society, when the creation of the prize was first announced last year.
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But the Abel committee will have its work cut out if this new prize is to rival the Nobels in popular appeal, because mathematics is a notoriously difficult topic to sell.
There is no question that Serre is a great mathematician. He was the youngest ever recipient of the Fields Medal back in 1954. His work has profoundly affected many areas of modern maths, including topology, number theory and algebraic geometry. For example, he developed tools to work out how many ways one can map high-dimensional spheres onto one another, a fundamental problem in topology. And his research was crucial in Andrew Wiles鈥檚 proof of Fermat鈥檚 last theorem.
But summaries of advances in pure mathematics, such as those given above, are inevitably superficial 鈥� Serre鈥檚 work is not only extraordinarily broad, it is exceedingly deep. If the prize is intended to raise the profile of maths with the general public, would it make more sense to bias the award towards work that can be more readily explained? Ball, himself an applied mathematician, doesn鈥檛 think so. 鈥淚t will only be given because of the importance of the work. Serre was a wonderful choice.鈥�
It may be that for the purpose of raising the profile of the subject, the maths doesn鈥檛 matter. The new prize does have two other advantages that might make all the difference.
The name of the award, which commemorates the life and work of 19th-century Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel, is reminiscent of the original prizes. And perhaps most importantly, it is presented in true Nobel style by the king of Norway.