A French-Russian mathematician has won the Abel Prize today for his work on advanced forms of geometry. The winner of the 6 million Norwegian kroner (US$920,000) prize, Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov, has held a permanent appointment at the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES) outside Paris since 1982. The Abel committee cited Gromov specifically for his contributions to three sub-disciplines of modern geometry: the study of Riemannian space, symplectic geometry, and groups of polynomial growth. Gromov is "renowned among mathematicians for his original approach", says Ian Stewart, a mathematician at the University of Warwick in Coventry. Among other things, modern geometers...