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OSLO, March 21 (Xinhua) -- French mathematician Yves Meyer has been named as the winner of the Abel Prize for 2017 "for his pivotal role in the development of the mathematical theory of wavelets", the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters said Tuesday.
Meyer, 78, "was the visionary leader in the modern development of this theory, at the intersection of mathematics, information technology and computational science", the academy said in its award citation.
He will receive the financial award of 6 million Norwegian kroner (715,000 U.S. dollars) from Norway's King Harald V at an award ceremony in Oslo on May 23.
Having made important contributions to the field of number theory early in his career, Meyer's boundless energy and curiosity prompted him to work on methods for breaking down complex mathematical objects into simpler wavelike components -- a topic called harmonic analysis.
Meyer was born in 1939 of French nationality and grew up in Tunis on the North African coast. He entered the Ecole normale superieure in Paris in 1957. Meyer later obtained his PhD in 1966 from the University of Strasbourg.
He became a professor of mathematics first at the Universite Paris-Sud, as it is now known, in 1966 to 1980, then the Ecole Polytechnique in 1980 to 1986, and the Universite Paris-Dauphine in 1986 to 1995.
Meyer moved to the Ecole normale superieure Cachan (recently renamed the ENS Paris-Saclay) in 1995, where he worked at the Centre of Mathematics and its Applications (CMLA) until formally retiring in 2008. But he is still an associate member of the research centre.
The Abel prize has been awarded annually since 2003 in memory of the Norwegian mathematics genius Niels Henrik Abel.
