Dennis Parnell Sullivan (Stony Brook University, USA, and the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, USA) was awarded the Abel Prize-20022 “for his groundbreaking contributions to topology in its broadest sense, and in particular its algebraic, geometric and dynamical aspects”.
The Abel Prize honors outstanding international mathematicians each year. The Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters administers the prize, which was founded by the Norwegian government in 2002.
The other world-renowned mathematician, Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie, was the original proponent of establishing a prize named after Niels Henrik Abel. One of the final things he did with his international clout before his death in 1899 was to raise funds for a fund that would give the Abel Prize every five years for excellent work in pure mathematics.
Dennis Parnell Sullivan (1941, Michigan) is a well-known American mathematician who is known for his revolutionary work in topology and dynamical systems, two subjects in which geometric structure plays a key role. He discovered deep linkages between a dizzying array of mathematical topics.
Sullivan began his studies at Rice University in chemistry, but moved to mathematics and graduated in 1963. Sullivan worked on one of the most fundamental topics in topology, the classification of manifolds, as a graduate student at Princeton University, expanding on the work of his thesis mentors William Browder and Sergei Novikov. Techniques for Triangulating Homotopy Equivalences, his PhD thesis from 1966, presented insights that helped change the area.
He won the 1971 Oswald Veblen Geometry Prize from the American Mathematical Society for a work on the fundamental conjecture in geometric topology, the first of many prizes in his career.
Awards and Honors
1971 Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry
1981 Prix Élie Cartan, French Academy of Sciences
1983 Member, National Academy of Sciences
1991 Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1994 King Faisal International Prize for Science
2004 National Medal of Science
2006 Steele Prize for lifetime achievement
2010 Wolf Prize in Mathematics, for "his contributions to algebraic topology and conformal dynamics"
2012 Fellow of the American Mathematical Society
2014 Balzan Prize in Mathematics (pure or applied)
2022 Abel Prize
