Abel Prize 2009 Geometry - the playground of Mikhail Gromov The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has decided to award the Abel Prize for 2009 to Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov, IHÉS, Bures-sur-Yvette, France, for his revolu- tionary contributions to geometry. The Russian-French mathematician Mikhail L. from 19985. The Abel committee says: “Mikhail Gromov is one of the leading mathematicians of Gromov is always in pursuit of new questions and our time. He is known for important contribu- is constantly think- tions in many areas of mathematics, especially ing of new ideas geometry. Mikhail Gromov has, over the last for solutions of 30 years, produced profoundly original general old problems. He ideas which have resulted in new perspectives on has produced deep geometry and other areas of mathematics. and original work Geometry is one of the oldest sciences, with tra- throughout his ca- ditions going back to the Antique. When Newton reer and remains re- introduced his fundamental theorem of calculus, markably creative. he laid the foundation for The work of Gro- a renewed understand- mov will continue ing of geometry, and of to be a source of Albert Einstein (1870-1955) course to explore the na- inspiration for many ture. The development future mathematical of modern physics and discoveries“. At the same time Gromov is a re- understanding of dif- searcher who is able to produce great results from ferential geometry have simple ideas. Dennis Sullivan gave this charac- shown to be a fruitfull teristic of Gromov: ”It is incredible what Mikhail symbiosis with contri- Gromov can do, just with the triangle inequal- Carl Friedrich Gauss butions made by great ity.!” (1826-1866) scientists like Lagrange, Gauss, Hamilton, Rie- mann, Einstein and this years laureate, Mikhail L. Gromov. Gromov´s introduction of pseudohol- omorphic maps in symplectic geometry lead to the so-called Gromov-Witten invariants, an im- portant notion in string theory, on of the “hottest” theories in modern theoretical physics. Gromovs name is forever attached to deep results and important concepts within Riemannian ge- ometry, symplectic geometry, string theory and group theory. The Abel committee emphasis in particular the development of pseudoholomor- phic maps on symplectic manifolds in a paper Mikhail L. Gromov (1943- ).