Neils Henrik Abel was a renowned Norwegian mathematician born in 1802 in Norway. He showed exceptional talent in mathematics from a young age. He received support and scholarships to study mathematics further and traveled to Copenhagen and universities in Germany and France to study under other mathematicians. Abel made several influential contributions to mathematics, most notably the first complete proof that the general quintic equation cannot be solved algebraically using radicals. He also invented group theory and made important advances in elliptic functions and Fermat's last theorem. Unfortunately, Abel died of tuberculosis at a young age in 1829, just before being appointed professor at the University of Berlin.