STOCKHOLM, March 27 (Xinhua) -- John Griggs Thompson from the United States and Jacques Tits from France won Norway's Abel Prize for mathematics Thursday.

    A Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters statement said they were awarded the prize for "their profound achievements in algebra and in particular for shaping modern group theory."

    Group theory is the "science of symmetries," where one tries to understand the relation between reflections and rotations of a icosahedron, to reveal the secrets of Rubik's Cube or to control the symmetries among the solutions of the fifth degree equation.

    "Thompson and Tits have invented important new concepts and proved fundamental results in this field, and their names now appear prominently in the history of group theory," the academy said in its statement.

    Thompson and Tits will share a prize of 6 million Norwegian kroner (about 1.2 million U.S. dollars).

    John Griggs Thompson, born in the U.S. state of Kansas in 1932,is a graduate research professor in the Department of Mathematics, University of Florida. Jacques Tits, born in Brussels in 1930, retired from his professorship at the College de France in 2000.

    The Abel Prize, the world's leading mathematics award, was set up by the Norwegian government in 2002 in memory of the country's 19th century mathematician Niels Henrik Abel.