The 'Nobel' of mathematics awards the solution to a three-century-old enigma.

BarcelonaGerman Gerd Faltings is the winner of the Abel Prize, awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and is considered the Nobel of mathematics, for his study of Diophantine equations (in which the solutions must be whole numbers, without decimals or fractions). Faltings is director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics and became a celebrity at the age of 29 when he proved a conjecture that won him the Fields Medal in 1986.

The best-known case of a Diophantine equation is the Last 9 posed, which asked whether the equation xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ had integer solutions for values ​​of n greater than 2. The answer is no, but proving it took centuries.

Faltings' contributions, which have allowed a leap forward in the proof of the 1637 theorem, have revolutionized arithmetic geometry, a branch of mathematics that lies at the crossroads of the two oldest: number theory and geometry. Born in 1954 in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, to a physicist father and a chemist mother, Faltings chose a different path: "I like mathematics because here things are either true or false, it's not a matter of opinion," he declared a little over a decade ago when he won the Shaw Prize. Today he is already considered one of the most influential mathematicians of the last 50 years.

This Thursday, he was awarded the Abel Prize, worth 680,000 euros, "for introducing powerful tools in the field of arithmetic geometry and for solving the Mordell and Lang Diophantine equations," explained the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The Academy noted that Faltings' ideas and results have reshaped this field. "He has not only resolved long-standing conjectures, but has also established new frameworks that have guided decades of subsequent work," it emphasized.