The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters awarded the 2026 Abel Prize to Gerd Faltings of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, for powerful new tools in arithmetic geometry and for settling long-standing conjectures of Mordell and Lang. He is the first German to receive the prize, which is worth 7.5 million Norwegian kroner.
Faltings's field is the study of Diophantine equations, where the solutions must be whole numbers or fractions. The Mordell conjecture, from 1922, says that a wide class of these equations can have only finitely many rational solutions. It stood unproven for 60 years until Faltings proved it in 1983, and it is now known as Faltings's theorem.
After Paul Vojta found a different proof in 1989, Faltings developed a new tool, now called Faltings's product theorem, and used it to prove the Mordell–Lang conjecture, another long-standing problem.
Born in West Germany in 1954, Faltings became a full professor at the University of Wuppertal in 1982, moved to Princeton University in 1985, and returned to Germany in 1994 as a director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, where he has been emeritus director since 2023. In 1986 he became the first German to win the Fields Medal.
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