Niels Henrik Abel (; 5 August 1802 – 6 April 1829) 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 250 years. He was also an innovator in the field of
elliptic functions, discoverer of
Abelian functions. Despite his achievements, Abel was largely unrecognized during his lifetime; he made his discoveries while living in poverty and died at the age of 26.