Belgian mathematician wins Abel Prize

OSLO, March 20 (Xinhua) -- The 69-year-old Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne was awarded on Wednesday this year's Abel Prize for his extraordinary contributions to mathematical sciences.

Pierre Deligne, born on Octpber 3, 1944, was announced as this year's winner of the Abel Prize by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters "for seminal contributions to algebraic geometry and for their transformative impact on number theory, representation theory, and related fields."

The mathematician, who is with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the United States, will receive the prize of one million U.S. dollars from Norwegian King Harald V at a ceremony in Oslo scheduled for on May 21.

Deligne's best known achievement is his solution of the last and deepest of the Weil conjectures, namely the analogue of the Riemann hypothesis for algebraic varieties over a finite field, the Abel Committee said in citation.

It added that his powerful concepts, ideas, results and methods continue to influence the development of algebraic geometry, as well as mathematics as a whole.

The Abel prize has been awarded annually since 2003 in memory of the Norwegian mathematics genius Niels Henrik Abel.