Niels Henrik Abel

Niels Henrik Abel was born on August 5, 1802, in Nedstrand near Stavanger. Despite severe poverty and the early death of his father, his prodigious mathematical intellect was recognized at the Cathedral School in Christiania by teacher Bernt Michael Holmboe.

At age twenty-one, Abel published his proof of the Abel–Ruffini theorem, establishing that general polynomial equations of degree five or higher cannot be solved by algebraic operations involving radicals—solving a problem that had stumped mathematicians for 250 years. He traveled to Berlin and Paris, where his monumental papers laid the foundations of modern group theory, commutative (Abelian) groups, and Abelian integrals. Tragically, he died of tuberculosis at age twenty-six, just two days before a letter arrived offering him a professorship in Berlin.