Newswise — The American Mathematical Society will today award several major prizes on at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans. 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: JOHN W. MILNOR, Professor of Mathematics and Codirector of the Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Stony Brook University, who stands out from the list of great mathematicians in terms of his overall achievements and his influence on mathematics in general, both through his work and through his excellent books.
AMS Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition: HENRYK IWANIEC, New Jersey State Professor at Rutgers University, for his long record of excellent exposition, both in books and in classroom notes, in particular his books INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECTRAL THEORY OF AUTOMORPHIC FORMS (Revista Matematica Iberoamericana, Madrid, 1995) and TOPICS IN CLASSICAL AUTOMORPHIC FORMS (Graduate Studies in Mathematics, 17, American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 1997).
AMS Steele Prize for a Seminal Contribution to Research: INGRID DAUBECHIES, a Professor in the Mathematics Department and in the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University, for her paper, "Orthonormal bases of compactly supported wavelets" (COMMUNICATIONS ON PURE AND APPLIED MATHEMATICS, 41 (1988), no. 7, 909-996), which constructed the very first examples of families of wavelets that have since become extremely popular in practical signal processing (for instance, they are used in the JPEG 2000 image compression scheme).
AMS Bocher Prize: ASSAF NAOR, Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University (also an associated faculty member in computer science), for introducing new invariants of metric spaces and for applying his new understanding of the distortion between various metric structures to theoretical computer science; and to GUNTHER UHLMANN, Endowed Excellence in Teaching Chair, University of California, Irvine, for his fundamental work on inverse problems and his incisive work on boundary rigidity and on nonuniqueness (also known as cloaking).
AMS Cole Prize in Number Theory: CHANDRASHEKHAR KHARE, Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and JEAN-PIERRE WINTENBERGER, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Strasbourg, for their remarkable proof of Serre's modularity conjecture, which was first proposed in 1973 by Fields Medalist Jean-Pierre Serre and which has had an important impact in number theory.
AMS Conant Prize: DAVID VOGAN, Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for his article "The character table for E_8" (NOTICES OF THE AMS 54 (2007), no. 9, 1122-1134), which tells the dramatic story of efforts to understand a complicated mathematical object known as E_8, originally discovered in the late 19th-century.
AMS Doob Prize: PETER KRONHEIMER, William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University, and TOMASZ MROWKA, Singer Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for their book MONOPOLES AND THREE-MANIFOLDS (Cambridge University Press, 2007), an ambitious and thorough account of the development of gauge theories that has transformed the study of three- and four-dimensional manifolds.
AMS Eisenbud Prize: HERBERT SPOHN, Professor and Chair of Mathematical Physics at the Technical University of Munich, for his work on stochastic growth processes, which has led to predictions that have been tested and verified in laboratory experiments and which has opened up many new lines of research in mathematics and physics.
AMS Satter Prize: AMIE WILKINSON, Professor of Mathematics at Northwestern University, for her remarkable contributions to the field of ergodic theory of partially hyperbolic dynamical systems, in particular, her paper "On the ergodicity of partially hyperbolic systems" (with K. Burns, ANNALS OF MATHEMATICS (2) 171 (2010), no. 1, 451-489).
AMS-MAA-SIAM Morgan Prize: MARIA MONKS, a master's degree student at Cambridge University who will begin the PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley, for impressive work in combinatorics and number theory that has appeared in ADVANCES IN APPLIED MATHEMATICS, PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMS, ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF COMBINATORICS, DISCRETE MATHEMATICS, and JOURNAL OF COMBINATORIAL THEORY, SERIES A.
JPBM Communications Award: NICOLAS FALACCI and CHERYL HEUTON, creators of the hit television series NUMB3RS, for the series's positive portrayal of the power and fun of mathematics, which made the show's fans aware of the ubiquity of mathematics in their daily lives.
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/profession/prizebooklet-2011.pdf. Find out more about AMS prizes at http://www.ams.org/prizes awards/prizes.
Founded in 1888 to further mathematical research and scholarship, today the more than 30,000 member American Mathematical 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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