John Tate wins Abel prize

John Torrence Tate was announced to be the winner of the 2010 Abel Prize on Wednesday. He will be awarded by the Norwegian king: the mathematics prize includes one million of dollars, something of the same sort that Grisha Perelman rejected a few days ago. See

Xinhua, Google News

He has studied at Princeton and Harvard, and worked at Harvard and Austin.

Tate received the accolade for his "vast and lasting impact on number theory". Since the 1950, he has worked on various kinds of Fourier analysis of exotic fields, with p-adic and adelic number being his bread, laid the foundations of the modern automorphic forms, and penned the 1963 Tate conjecture which is a kind of discrete counterpart of the (yet unproven, USD 1 million expecting) Hodge conjecture and relates Galois modules and étale cohomology. Tate modules are constructed from an abelian group.

Most importantly, as every deep mathematician, Tate has influenced string theory more profoundly than many string theorists. Because of a realization by Morrison and Vafa in 1996, Tate's algorithm is constantly used in F-theory to determine the types of singular fibers of a Weierstrass model - which is also needed needed to find the gauge group. SU(5) GUTs in F-theory would be impossible without him.

Congratulations!

Via Jonathan Mboyo Esole