The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has awarded the Abel Prize for 2013 to Pierre Deligne, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, US. He receives the Prize, ‘for seminal contributions to algebraic geometry and for their transformative impact on number theory, representation theory, and related fields’. Deligne will receive the Abel Prize from HM King Harald at an award ceremony in Oslo on the 21st of May. More information is available here
Graeme Segal, LMS President, said, ‘I am delighted to learn of the award of this year’s Abel Prize to Pierre Deligne, and to congratulate him on behalf of the London Mathematical Society. For half a century he has been one the world’s leading mathematicians, and one of its most distinctive voices. He became an honorary member of the LMS in 2003. He sprang to fame as a disciple of Alexander Grothendieck, successfully completing Grothendieck’s programme for proving the Weil conjectures relating the number of points of algebraic varieties over finite fields to the topology of the corresponding variety over the complex numbers, and he went on to give us a new picture of how algebraic structure manifests itself in topology. Since then he has done transformative work in many fields, especially group representation theory and number theory, but even beyond that; he was one of the leading contributors to the programme bringing quantum field theory to mathematicians at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1996-7. An enormous number of people have been the beneficiaries of his widely circulated inimitable handwritten letters to a panoply of mathematical colleagues in which he provides a wonderful new perspective or an elucidation of some mathematical topic that has attracted his attention. He has always been one of my personal heroes’.