At nearly the same time with Abel, Jacobi published articles on ellipt — Niels Henrik Abel

"On the whole, I do not like the French as well as the Germans; the French are extremely reserved toward strangers... Everybody works for himself without concern for others. All want to instruct, and nobody wants to learn. The most absolute egotism reigns everywhere. The only thing the French look for in strangers is the practical; no one can think except himself, he is the only one who can produce anything theoretical. This is the way he thinks and so you can understand it is really difficult to be noticed, particularly for a beginner."

"Abel criticised the use of infinite series, and discovered the well-known theorem which furnishes a test for the validity of the result obtained by multiplying one infinite series by another. He also proved the binomial theorem for the expansion of (1 + x)^n when x and n are complex. As illustrating his fertility of ideas... notice his celebrated demonstration that it is impossible to express a root of the general quintic equation in terms of its coefficients by means of a finite number of radicals and rational functions; this theorem was the more important since it definitely limited a field of mathematics which had previously attracted numerous writers. ...this theorem had been enunciated as early as 1798 by Paolo Ruffini... but I believe that the proof he gave was lacking in generality."

"Great as were the achievements of Abel in elliptic functions, they were eclipsed by his researches on what are now called Abelian functions. Abels theorem on these functions was given by him in several forms, the most general of these being that in his Mémoire sur une propriété générale dune classe trés-étendue de fonctions transcendentes (1826). ...A few months after his arrival in Paris [July, 1826], Abel submitted it to the French Academy. Cauchy and Legendre were appointed to examine it; but said nothing about it until after Abels death. ...The memoir remained in Cauchys hands. It was not published until 1841. By a singular mishap, the manuscript was lost before the proof-sheets were read."

"Abels theorem was pronounced by Jacobi the greatest discovery of our century on the integral calculus. The aged Legendre, who greatly admired Abels genius, called it "monumentum aere perennius." During the few years of work allotted to the young Norwegian, he penetrated new fields of research, the development of which has kept mathematicians busy for over half a century."

"Rigorous analysis begins with the work of Bolzano, Cauchy, Abel, and Dirichlet and was furthered by Weierstrass."

"It is readily seen that any theory written by Laplace will be superior to all produced of lower standing. It appears to me that if one wants to make progress in mathematics, one should study the masters and not the pupils."