A new plaque to commemorate the celebrated Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel (August 5th 1802 - April 6th 1829) was inaugurated on the April 6th in Berlin, Germany. The Norwegian ambassador Sven E. Svedman and the Secretary of the International Mathematical Union, Professor Martin Grötschel, jointly unveiled the plaque.

The plaque is now located on the facade of his former Berlin apartment building on the street "Am Kupfergraben" number 4a, which is situated opposite the Pergamon Museum. The house was destroyed in World War II but after 1989 a new building was constructed on the property where the plaque is now mounted. The plaque was designed by the artist Erika Klagge and funded by the Berlin company "Gießerei Noack".

Abel lived in 1825 and 1826 in the centre of Berlin. During this time he was supported by the mathematician, engineer and publisher August Leopold Crelle, who published Abels work in his "Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics". Thanks to the support of Crelle, Abel received his first international scientific recognition. 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 and discoverer of Abelian functions. When he died, only 26 years old, he left a large body of work, including the first proof of the general binomial theorem, which had been stated by Newton and Euler.

In his memory, the Norwegian Academy of Sciences awards the Abel Prize (founded in 2003), which is, next to the Field Medal, the highest scientific award in mathematics. In 2014 the Abel Prize was awarded to the Russian mathematician Yakov G. Sinai.

The plaque was an initiative of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) in cooperation with the Norwegian Academy of Sciences.