Explanation:

• Dr Firdausi Qadri, a vaccine scientist from Bangladesh and Muhammad Amjad Saqib, the microfinance pioneer from Pakistan are among the five recipients of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Award.
• Established in 1957, the award is Asia’s highest honour and regarded as the Asian version of the Nobel Prize.
• The other winners are Filipino fisher and community environmentalist Roberto Ballon, American Steven Muncy for humanitarian work and refugee assistance and Indonesian torchbearer for investigative journalism, Watchdoc.
• The award is given every year to individuals or organisations in Asia who provide significant service to the society.

The History of the Abel Prize

Three main tasks were specified as the celebration of the Abel centenary in 1902 approached. The first was to arrange a broad cultural commemoration, the second to raise a worthy monument in memory of the genius and the third, to establish an international Abel Prize.

The first two tasks were completed. The Abel festivities in September 1902 were held with pomp and circumstance, and students, townspeople, scientists, artists, the Storting, the Government and the royal family attended. A number of foreign mathematicians also present were awarded honorary doctorates. Gustav Vigeland's Abel monument on Abelhaugen, a knoll on the Palace grounds, was unveiled six years later. For various reasons, however, the plans for an Abel Prize were set aside.

The first eager proponent of establishing an Abel Prize was the mathematician Sophus Lie, Norway's other world-renowned mathematician. Before his death in 1899, one of the last things he used his international prestige for was to gather support for establishing a fund that would award an Abel Prize every five years for outstanding work in pure mathematics. Lie's effort was, by all accounts, inspired by the ongoing collection for the Nansen Fund and certainly by the fact that Alfred Nobel's plans for annual prizes, made known in 1897, lacked a prize in mathematics.

Although the support from the leading centres of mathematics in Europe was over-whelming, the contacts and promises for support were tied too much to Sophus Lie personally. Therefore, when he died, the effort died too. Not until the centenary celebration in 1902 did King Oscar II become interested in a prize in Abel’s honour. In close association with the Science Society of Christiania, today the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the mathematicians Carl Størmer and Ludvig Sylow drew up statutes and rules for this prize.

{ further information regarding ABEL prize will be avilable in STUDY NOTES }