Niels Henrik Abel was a Norwegian mathematician who made pioneering contributions in a variety of fields. His most famous single result is the first complete proof demonstrating the impossibility of solving the general quintic equation in radicals. This question was one of the outstanding open problems of his day, and had been unresolved for over 250 years. He was also an innovator in the field of elliptic functions, discoverer of Abelian functions. He made his discoveries while living in poverty and died at the age of 26 from tuberculosis.
Niels Henrik Abel
Postcard of Gjerstad church and rectory in 1890–95. The main building of the rectory was the same as when Abel lived here.
From the notebook of Niels Henrik Abel
Christine Kemp
Charles Hermite FRS FRSE MIAS was a French mathematician who did research concerning number theory, quadratic forms, invariant theory, orthogonal polynomials, elliptic functions, and algebra.
Charles Hermite
Charles Hermite circa 1887