Born near Stavanger, Norway, Abel was the son of Sören Georg Abel, a Lutheran minister and prominent figure in the Norwegian nationalist movement. Niels performed poorly in school but had an extraordinary ability in mathematics, which his teacher, Bernt Michael Holmboe, noticed almost immediately. In his last year of school, Abel declared that he had found the form to the solution of equations of the fifth degree, a mathematical problem that had puzzled mathematicians since the mid-sixteenth century. In Norway, no one could understand Abel's arguments, and there was no scientific journal in which he could publish his results. His " discovery" was forwarded to the Danish Academy, where it was received with interest, although Abel himself later found that his conclusions were false. The faculty of the newly instituted University of Oslo, in Norway, was alerted to Abel's work on the quintic equation and on elliptic...