Niels Henrik Abel

Niels Henrik Abel was a Norwegian mathematician. His most famous single result is the first complete proof demonstrating the impossibility of solving the general quintic equation in radicals. He was also an innovator in the field of elliptic functions, discoverer of Abelian functions. He made his discoveries while living in poverty and died at the age of 26 from tuberculosis. The Abel Prize in mathematics, originally proposed in 1899 to complement the Nobel Prizes, is named in his honour.