The Abel Prize is an annual mathematics prize dedicated to the memory of Niels Henrik Abel (1802-1829). It was established by the Norwegian Parliament in 2002, the bicentenary of Abel's birth, and is awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters on behalf of the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. The prize carries a cash award of 7.5 million Norwegian kroner (The Abel Prize 2026a). The prize developed from an initiative at the University of Oslo that revived an unsuccessful proposal made by the Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie near the end of the 19th century (The Abel Prize 2026b).
The Abel Prize has been awarded annually beginning in the year 2003, as summarized in the following table (The Abel Prize 2024, 2025, 2026c, 2026d).
| year | winner | citation |
| 2003 | Jean-Pierre Serre | for playing a key role in shaping the modern form of many parts of mathematics, including topology, algebraic geometry, and number theory |
| 2004 | Sir Michael Francis Atiyah and Isadore M. Singer | for their discovery and proof of the Atiyah-Singer index theorem |
| 2005 | Peter Lax | for his groundbreaking contributions to the theory and application of partial differential equations and to the computation of their solutions |
| 2006 | Lennart Carleson | for his profound and seminal contributions to harmonic analysis and the theory of smooth dynamical systems |
| 2007 | Srinivasa S. R. Varadhan | for his fundamental contributions to probability theory and in particular for creating a unified theory of large deviations |
| 2008 | John Griggs Thompson and Jacques Tits | for their profound achievements in algebra and in particular for shaping modern group theory |
| 2009 | Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov | for his revolutionary contributions to geometry |
| 2010 | John T. Tate | for his vast and lasting impact on the theory of numbers |
| 2011 | John Milnor | for pioneering discoveries in topology, geometry, and algebra |
| 2012 | Endre Szemerédi | 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 |
| 2013 | Pierre Deligne | for seminal contributions to algebraic geometry and for their transformative impact on number theory, representation theory, and related fields |
| 2014 | Yakov Sinai | for his fundamental contributions to dynamical systems, ergodic theory, and mathematical physics |
| 2015 | John F. Nash, Jr. and Louis Nirenberg | for striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis |
| 2016 | Andrew Wiles | for his stunning proof of Fermat's last theorem by way of the modularity conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory |
| 2017 | Yves Meyer | for his pivotal role in the development of the mathematical theory of wavelets |
| 2018 | Robert Langlands | for his visionary program connecting representation theory to number theory |
| 2019 | Karen Uhlenbeck | for her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics |
| 2020 | Hillel Furstenberg and Grigory Margulis | for pioneering the use of methods from probability and dynamics in group theory, number theory and combinatorics |
| 2021 | László Lovász and Avi Wigderson | for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics |
| 2022 | Dennis Sullivan | for his groundbreaking contributions to topology in its broadest sense, and in particular its algebraic, geometric and dynamical aspects |
| 2023 | Luis Caffarelli | for his seminal contributions to regularity theory for nonlinear partial differential equations including free-boundary problems and the Monge-Ampère equation |
| 2024 | Michel Talagrand | for his groundbreaking contributions to probability theory and functional analysis, with outstanding applications in mathematical physics and statistics |
| 2025 | Masaki Kashiwara | for his fundamental contributions to algebraic analysis and representation theory, in particular the development of the theory of D-modules and the discovery of crystal bases |
| 2026 | Gerd Faltings | for introducing powerful tools in arithmetic geometry and resolving long-standing diophantine conjectures of Mordell and Lang |
