Atle Selberg was born in Langesund, Norway, on 14th June, 1917. He studied mathematics at the University of Oslo and obtained his Ph.D in 1943.

Selberg emigrated to the United States and became a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1950 he was awarded a Fields Medal for his work on generalizations of the sieve methods of Viggo Brun. He is the author of two major books on mathematics, Number Theory, Trace Formulas and Discrete Groups (1989) and Collected Papers (1991).