Niels Henrik Abel
1802 – 1829 · aged 27
Norwegian mathematician (1802–1829)
- Born
- 5 Aug 1802 · Finnøy
- Died
- 6 Apr 1829 · Froland
Life timeline
Their life from birth to death. On the timeline, world events of the time are shown faintly.
- 5 Aug 1802BornBorn in Finnøy
- 6 Apr 1829DiedDied in Froland
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Meanwhile in the world
Major world events during their lifetime (1802 – 1829).
- 1812 – 1815War of 1812
- 1814 – 1815Congress of Vienna
Biography
Niels Henrik Abel ( AH-bəl, Norwegian: [ˌnɪls ˈhɛ̀nːɾɪk ˈɑ̀ːbl̩]; 5 August 1802 – 6 April 1829) was a Norwegian mathematician who made pioneering contributions in a variety of fields. His most famous single result is the first complete proof demonstrating the impossibility of solving the general quintic equation in radicals. This question was one of the outstanding open problems of his day, and had been unresolved for over 250 years. He was also an innovator in the field of elliptic functions and the discoverer of Abelian functions. He made his discoveries while living in poverty and died at the age of 26 from tuberculosis.
Most of his work was done in six or seven years of his working life. Regarding Abel, the French mathematician Charles Hermite said: "Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years." Another French mathematician, Adrien-Marie Legendre, said: "What a head the young Norwegian has!"
Text from the Wikipedia article Niels Henrik Abel, CC BY-SA 4.0
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