Karen Uhlenbeck received the 2019 Abel Prize from King Harald V of Norway in Oslo, the first time a woman was presented with this top mathematics prize.
On May 21, 2019, Karen Uhlenbeck formally received the 2019 Abel Prize from King Harald V of Norway at a ceremony held in Oslo. The Abel Prize, established by the Norwegian government in 2002 to commemorate mathematician Niels Henrik Abel, is awarded annually for outstanding contributions to mathematics and carries a monetary award of approximately NOK 7.5 million (roughly $700,000 USD at the time).
The ceremony marked the historic moment when, for the first time in the prize's history, a woman was presented with this top international mathematics honor. Uhlenbeck's award recognized her transformative body of work spanning geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory, and integrable systems—research that had reshaped the mathematical understanding of minimal surfaces, harmonic maps, and Yang-Mills fields since the 1970s and 1980s.
The Oslo ceremony was attended by mathematicians, dignitaries, and members of the Norwegian royal family, and was broadcast to a global audience, symbolizing the international significance of the recognition. Uhlenbeck's acceptance speech reflected on both her scientific journey and the barriers women had historically faced in mathematics.
This moment stood as a capstone to a career of firsts, following her historic 1990 ICM plenary lecture and her role as the first woman elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in mathematics, further cementing her legacy as a trailblazer for women in the mathematical sciences.