Prizes & Laureates
There is no Nobel in mathematics.
Alfred Nobel did not include mathematics in his 1895 will. In its place, the discipline has the Fields Medal (quadrennial, under-40), the Abel Prize (annual, lifetime achievement), and a list of Nobel laureates in adjacent fields whose core work was unmistakably mathematical.
Three lists
The honours that recognise mathematical achievement.
Fields Medal
Awarded every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians to up to four mathematicians under the age of 40. The discipline's most prestigious honour for early- to mid-career work.
64 laureates
See all → Since 2003 · annualAbel Prize
Established by the Norwegian government in explicit parallel to the Nobel Prize. Lifetime-achievement award with a cash prize comparable to the Nobel's.
27 laureates
See all → Nobel-adjacentMathematicians with Nobel Prizes
Mathematicians whose core work was mathematical but recognised with a Nobel Prize in Economics, Physics, or Literature — including Russell, Nash, Kantorovich, Scholes, and Penrose.
25 laureates
See all →Why no mathematics Nobel
Alfred Nobel's 1895 will, and what the community built instead.
Alfred Nobel's 1895 will established prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. Mathematics was not among them. Various legends have attempted to explain the absence — most famously (and incorrectly) that Nobel excluded mathematics because Gösta Mittag-Leffler had an affair with his wife. Nobel was never married.
The more prosaic explanation: Nobel was an inventor and industrial chemist. His prizes targeted fields with clear practical impact in his worldview. Pure mathematics sat outside that frame.
The mathematical community responded in two stages. In 1936, John Charles Fields and the International Mathematical Union established the Fields Medal, with the specific aim of recognising work early in a mathematician's career. In 2003, the Norwegian government founded the Abel Prize — explicitly modelled on the Nobel, with a cash award of comparable magnitude, for lifetime mathematical achievement.
Separately, a number of mathematicians have won Nobel Prizes in adjacent fields — most visibly in Economics, where mathematical methods are central to every major award since the prize was created in 1969. Russell's 1950 Literature Nobel (for his philosophical writing rooted in Principia Mathematica) and Penrose's 2020 Physics Nobel (for mathematical work on gravitational collapse) are the two most striking non-Economics cases.