John Milnor, the American mathematician known for his discovery of exotic hyperspheres, has been awarded the 2011 Abel Prize by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The Abel Prize, which is accompanied by a cash award of USD$1 million, is generally regarded as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of mathematics.
Milnor’s principal field of study is the field of differential topology. One of Milnor’s discoveries was an exotic hypersphere in seven dimensions. Milnor showed that the solution of a problem such the propagation of waves or heat on this manifold could not be smoothly translated
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