On May 19 another math professor from N.Y.U., Micha Gromov, traveled to Norway to pick up his Abel, given for what the prize committee called "his revolutionary contributions to geometry." In the process, N.Y.U.'s math department, which has long ranked among the top in the nation, along with those at Princeton, Harvard and Berkeley, has assumed an almost cultlike status.
"It really is phenomenal," said Donald E. McClure, executive director of the American Mathematical Society, a leading professional organization of research mathematicians. "It has the same distinction as a Nobel Prize, and there's no other institution in the United States or in the world that has had such a concentration of these awards."
