Prize for Mathematician Who Paved Way for Ipod

A £500,000 prize that is considered the "Nobel" for mathematics has gone to an 80-year-old Swedish academic whose work on the complexities of soundwaves has subsequently been used in the electronic components of iPods.

Lennart Carleson seemed slightly bewildered at the news he had won the Abel prize, named after a brilliant Norwegian mathematician who died young. "They just called me up," he said, "It's a thing you don't really expect to happen. There are many good candidates, why should it be me?" How did he react to the news? "I just said thank you."

Prof Carleson's major contributions have come in two fields - the first has subsequently been used in the components of sound systems and the second helps to predict how markets and weather systems respond to change.

In the 1960s Carleson showed that any sound, no matter how complicated, can be represented as a series of sine waves. "That translates in the real world as the idea that any sound can be reproduced using the sound of a tuning fork," said a University of Oxford mathematician, Marcus du Sautoy. "The sound of a lion roaring can be broken down into just simple tuning forks."

In an iPod, tunes stored electronically as complex waves are split into their different components when played.

"For years people didn't understand the complexities of it," said Prof du Sautoy. "In recent years they've realised how amazing Carleson's work was."

Mathematicians are now referring to the four-year-old Abel prizes as the new Nobel for maths. The prize, which is awarded by the Norwegian Academy, is named after Niels Henrik Abel, and is awarded annually.

The young mathematician died after a freezing sleigh ride to see his girlfriend in 1829. The cold brought on a bout of TB, which quickly killed him. He was 26. A year later he received a letter from the Paris academy, which had not heard of his death, informing him that he had been awarded a prestigious grand prix for his theory on symmetry.