This year's Abel Prize goes to the "true virtuoso" Dennis Sullivan.

It's one of the most beautiful sights in nature: fireflies illuminating the night with their synchronised flashing. Mathematicians have just solved a 40 year-old problem behind this striking phenomenon.

If you're bored with your holiday snaps, then why not turn them into fractals? A new result by US mathematicians shows that you can turn any reasonable 2D shape into a fractal, and the fractals involved are very special too. They are intimately related to the famous Mandelbrot set.

The Abel Prize 2011 goes to John Willard Milnor of Stony Brook University, New York for "pioneering discoveries in topology, geometry and algebra".

Some news on Julia sets