Gerd Faltings has won the 2026 Abel Prize Peter Badge/Typos1 Gerd Faltings has won the 2026 Abel Prize, considered the Nobel prize of mathematics, for a groundbreaking proof which took mathematics by storm in 1983. His contributions helped establish one of the most important fields in modern mathematics, arithmetic geometry. The crowning achievement of Faltings, who also won the prestigious Fields medal in 1986 for the same work, was proving the Mordell conjecture, a longstanding theorem first proposed by the Louis Mordell in 1922 which argues that increasingly complicated equations produce fewer solutions. Faltings, who is based at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Germany, says he was “honoured” when he found out the news, but was reserved about the impact of his achievements. “Somebody said, about climbing Mount Everest, it’s because it’s there and it was a problem,” says Faltings. “I solved [the Mordell conjecture], but in the end it doesn’t allow us to cure cancer or Alzheimer’s, it’s just extending our knowledge of things.” The Mordell conjecture concerns Diophantine equations, a vast …