for Advanced Study Selberg moved to the United States and worked as an associate professor at Syracuse University and later settled at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey in the 1950s where he remained until his death. During the 1950s he worked on introducing spectral theory into number theory, culminating in his development of the Selberg trace formula, the most famous and influential of his results. In its simplest form, this establishes a duality between the lengths of closed geodesics on a compact Riemann surface and the eigenvalues of the Laplacian, which is analogous to the duality between the prime numbers and the zeros of the zeta function. He was awarded the 1986 Wolf Prize in Mathematics. He was also awarded an honorary Abel Prize in 2002, its founding year, before the awarding of the regular prizes began. Selberg received many distinctions for his work in addition to the Fields Medal, the Wolf Prize and the Gunnerus Medal. He was elected to the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1972 he was awarded an honorary degree, doctor philos. honoris causa, at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, later part of Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His first wife, Hedvig, died in 1995. With her, Selberg had two children: Ingrid Selberg (married to playwright Mustapha Matura) and Lars Selberg. In 2003 Atle Selberg married Betty Frances ("Mickey") Compton (born in 1929). He died at home in Princeton, New Jersey on 6 August 2007 of heart failure. Selected publications Atle Selberg Collected Papers: 1 (Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg), Collected Papers (Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg Mai 1998), References Further reading Albers, Donald J. and Alexanderson, Gerald L. (2011), Fascinating Mathematical People: interviews and memoirs, "Atle Selberg", pp 254–73, Princeton University Press, . Interview with Selberg External links Atle Selberg Archive webpage Obituary at IAS Obituary in The Times Atle Selbergs private archive exists at NTNU University Library 1917 births 2007 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Fields Medalists Institute for Advanced Study faculty Members of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters Members of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters Norwegian emigrants to the United States Norwegian mathematicians Number theorists People from Bamble University of Oslo alumni Wolf Prize in Mathematics laureates Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences