Newswise — The American Mathematical Society will award several major prizes on Thursday, January 14, 2010, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco. The AMS prizes are among the world's most important honors given for outstanding contributions to mathematics.

Included are two prizes that are given jointly with two other mathematics organizations, the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), as well as one award given by the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics (JPBM).

AMS Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement: WILLIAM FULTON, Oscar Zariski Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan, for his research, his writing, and his intellectual leadership in algebraic geometry, and for his teaching and mentoring, which have nurtured several generations of younger mathematicians.

AMS Steele Prize for a Seminal Contribution to Research: ROBERT L. GRIESS JR. of the University of Michigan, for his construction of the "Monster" sporadic finite simple group, which he first announced in a 1981 paper in the PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES U.S.A.

AMS Steele Prize for Exposition: DAVID EISENBUD of the University of California, Berkeley, for his book COMMUTATIVE ALGEBRA: WITH A VIEW TOWARD ALGEBRAIC GEOMETRY (Springer-Verlag, 1995), which serves as a textbook introducing newcomers to the area and is also used by researchers around the world.

AMS Conant Prize: BRYNA KRA, Northwestern University for her article, "The Green-Tao Theorem on Arithmetic Progressions in the Primes: An Ergodic Point of View" (BULLETIN OF THE AMS 43 (2006), no. 1, 3-23).

AMS Moore Prize: SORIN POPA, University of California, Los Angeles, for his paper "On the Superrigidity of Malleable Actions with Spectral Gap" (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY 21 (2008), no. 4, 981-1000).

AMS Robbins Prize: ILEANA STREINU, Smith College for her paper "Pseudo-triangulations, Rigidity and Motion Planning" (DISCRETE & COMPUTATIONAL GEOMETRY 34 (2005), no. 4, 587-635).

AMS Veblen Prize: TOBIAS H. COLDING, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and WILLIAM P. MINICOZZI II, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, for their profound work on minimal surfaces; and PAUL SEIDEL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for his fundamental contributions to symplectic geometry and, in particular, for his development of advanced algebraic methods for computation of symplectic invariants.

AMS Award for Distinguished Public Service: CARLOS CASTILLO-CHAVEZ, Joaquin Bustoz Jr. Professor of Mathematical Biology and a Regents Professor at Arizona State University, for having had a major impact with his efforts and activities in improving the representation in the broad mathematical sciences of the nation's traditionally underrepresented and economically disadvantaged students.

AMS-SIAM Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics: DAVID L. DONOHO, Stanford University, for introducing novel fundamental and powerful mathematical tools in signal processing and image analysis.

AMS-MAA-SIAM Morgan Prize: SCOTT DUKE KOMINERS, a student in the Harvard Business Economics PhD program, for his outstanding and prolific record of undergraduate research spanning a broad range of topics, including number theory, computational geometry, and mathematical economics.

JPBM Communications Award: MARCUS DU SAUTOY, Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, for communicating mathematics to a broad public through his books, television shows, and hundreds of articles and appearances in newspapers, magazines, television, and radio.

After the prize ceremony, the full citation for this prize and additional information can be found in the Prize Booklet, at http://www.ams.org/ams/prizebooklet-2010.pdf. Find out more about AMS prizes at http://www.ams.org/prizes-awards.

Founded in 1888 to further mathematical research and scholarship, today the American Mathematical Society has more than 32,000 members. The Society fulfills its mission through programs and services that promote mathematical research and its uses, strengthen mathematical education, and foster awareness and appreciation of mathematics and its connections to other disciplines and to everyday life.

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