The Abel prize is a new mathematics prize of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, dedicated to the memory of Niels Henrik Abel (1802-1829) on the occasion of the bicentenary of his birth. It is modeled after the Nobel Prize, and developed from a proposal by the mathematics department at the University of Oslo in fulfillment of a request formulated by the Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie towards the end of the 19th century.
The Abel Prize has been awarded annually beginning in the year 2003, as summarized in the following table.
| year | winner | citation |
| 2003 | Jean-Pierre Serre | for playing a key role in shaping the modern form of many parts of mathematics, including topology, algebraic geometry, and number theory |
| 2004 | Sir Michael Francis Atiyah and Isadore M. Singer | for their discovery and proof of the Atiyah-Singer index theorem |
| 2005 | Peter Lax | for his groundbreaking contributions to the theory and application of partial differential equations and to the computation of their solutions |
| 2006 | Lennart Carleson | for his profound and seminal contributions to harmonic analysis and the theory of smooth dynamical systems |
| 2007 | Srinivasa S. R. Varadhan | for his fundamental contributions to probability theory and in particular for creating a unified theory of large deviations |
| 2008 | John Griggs Thompson and Jacques Tits | for their profound achievements in algebra and in particular for shaping modern group theory |
| 2009 | Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov | for his revolutionary contributions to geometry |
| 2010 | John T. Tate | for his vast and lasting impact on the theory of numbers |
| 2011 | John Milnor | for pioneering discoveries in topology, geometry, and algebra |
| 2012 | Endre Szemerédi | for his fundamental contributions to discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science, and in recognition of the profound and lasting impact of these contributions on additive number theory and ergodic theory |
| 2013 | Pierre Deligne | for seminal contributions to algebraic geometry and for their transformative impact on number theory, representation theory, and related fields |
| 2014 | Yakov Sinai | for his fundamental contributions to dynamical systems, ergodic theory, and mathematical physics |
| 2015 | John F. Nash, Jr. and Louis Nirenberg | for striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis |
| 2016 | Andrew Wiles | for his stunning proof of Fermat's Last Theorem by way of the modularity conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory |
| 2017 | Yves Meyer | for his pivotal role in the development of the mathematical theory of wavelets |
| 2018 | Robert Langlands | for his visionary program connecting representation theory to number theory |
| 2019 | Karen Uhlenbeck | for her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics |
| 2020 | Hillel Furstenberg and Grigory Margulis | for pioneering the use of methods from probability and dynamics in group theory, number theory and combinatorics |
| 2021 | László Lovász and Avi Wigderson | for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics |
| 2022 | Dennis Sullivan | for his groundbreaking contributions to topology in its broadest sense, and in particular its algebraic, geometric and dynamical aspects |
| 2023 | Luis Caffarelli | for his seminal contributions to regularity theory for nonlinear partial differential equations including free-boundary problems and the Monge-Ampère equation |
