This year, the Abel Prize was awarded to German mathematician Gerd Faltings "for introducing powerful tools in arithmetic geometry and resolving the long-standing Mordell and Lang conjectures".
Faltings’ research concerns the curves associated with polynomial equations with integer coefficients, known as Diophantine equations. The focus is on points with rational coordinates, hence the name arithmetic geometry. In particular, he proved a conjecture formulated in 1922 by the English mathematician Louis Mordell (1888–1972): in general—that is, when the genus of the curve is at least 2—there are only finitely many such points.
He had already received numerous awards, notably the Fields Medal in 1986, alongside two specialists in four-dimensional topology: the English mathematician Simon Donaldson and the American mathematician Michael Freedman.
