Karen Uhlenbeck becomes the first woman to receive the Abel Prize, the highest honour for contributions in the field of Mathematics.
The New Leam Staff
Karen Uhlenbeck’s name will be registered in history for a long time to come and she will become an inspiration for women across the world for decades to come. She is an American mathematician and professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Texas, Austin. She is also the visiting associate at the IAS and visiting research scholar at Princeton University.
She has won the 2019 Abel Prize for her outstanding contributions to the fields of geometric partial and differential equations, gauge theory and integrable systems and for the impact of her work on analysis, mathematical physics and geometry. Her achievements are to be celebrated more because she is the first woman in the world to be awarded this prize.
The prize that she is receiving is awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters that was set up to address the fact that in the Nobel Prize there is no category for mathematics. It is believed that her contributions have had a strong impact on mathematics and have revolutionised the understanding of minimal surfaces such as those formed by soap bubbles and more general minimization issues in higher dimensions.
Her work is only known for providing a foundation vital to particle physics, string theory and general relativity. The news of her receiving the equivalent of the Nobel Prize is particularly good because not only is it recognizing the achievements of such a great mathematician but also setting an example for women across the world.
She is the first woman to have received such a prize in a context where most prize recipients have been male. It should be acknowledged that her being given the prize is of great significance because so far out of the 904 individual Nobel Laureates, only 51 have been women. She will be awarded the Abel Prize at a special ceremony on 21 May in Oslo.
