The President of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Nils Christian Stenseth has announced the winner of the 2012 Abel Prize. This year’s Prize goes to Endre Szemerédi, Alfréd Rényi, Institute of Mathematics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest and Department of Computer Science, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, US. Szemerédi receives the award ‘for his fundamental contributions to discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science, and in recognition of the profound and lasting impact of these contributions on additive number theory and ergodic theory’. His Majesty King Harald will present the award at a ceremony in Oslo on 22 May.
Professor Tim Gowers, University of Cambridge says, ‘Endre Szemerédi is one of the world's foremost combinatorialists. He is particularly famous for his deep theorem about arithmetic progressions, which was proved in 1975 and solved a conjecture of Erdős and Turán from 1936. He has proved many other important results and introduced techniques that have had a dramatic impact on research in combinatorics'.
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