Overview
- The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced the award on March 19, with a prize of 7.5 million Norwegian kroner.
- Gerd Faltings, based at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, had earlier received the 1986 Fields Medal for this body of work.
- Faltings’s theorem establishes that curves of genus greater than one have only finitely many rational solutions, confirming a 1922 conjecture by Louis Mordell.
- Methods introduced in his proof helped catalyze p-adic Hodge theory and informed later breakthroughs, including work connected to Andrew Wiles.
- Contemporary research continues to extend his insights, including recent results giving explicit bounds on rational points, and the prize will be presented in Oslo on May 26.