Mathematician wins 2026 Abel prize for solving 60-year-old mystery

Gerd Faltings has won the 2026 Abel Prize, considered the Nobel prize of mathematics, for a groundbreaking proof which took mathematics by storm in 1983. His contributions helped establish one of the most important fields in modern mathematics, arithmetic geometry.

The crowning achievement of Faltings, who also won the prestigious Fields medal in 1986 for the same work, was proving the Mordell conjecture, a longstanding theorem first proposed by the Louis Mordell in 1922 which argues that increasingly complicated equations produce fewer solutions.