Brian Conrey Receives 2008 AMS Conant Prize

January 7, 2008

Providence, RI:

Brian Conrey, director of the American Institute of Mathematics in Palo Alto, California, is receiving the 2008 AMS Levi L. Conant Prize. Presented annually by the American Mathematical Society, the Conant Prize recognizes an outstanding expository paper published in either the Notices of the AMS or the Bulletin of the AMS in the preceding five years. The prize was awarded today at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego, California.

Conrey is honored for his article "The Riemann Hypothesis", AMS Notices, March 2003, pages 341-353.  "The Riemann Hypothesis (RH) has a strong claim to being the outstanding open problem in mathematics," the prize citation says.  "Much has been written about RH, but rarely with anything like the scope that Conrey covers in but a dozen Notices pages, outlining the mathematical context that justifies the importance of RH, key moments in the problem's 140-plus year history, known partial results and blind alleys, various threads of numerical and theoretical evidence, and suggestive connections with disparate branches of mathematics and theoretical physics...  Conrey has given a masterly and lucid introduction to the plot thus far, to the detectives who brought us to this point, and to what may be called the main suspects: the mathematical structures that might be expected to figure in the eventual resolution of this central mystery of modern mathematics."

Conrey's prize-winning article is freely available on the Notices website at http://www.ams.org/notices/200303/fea-conrey-web.pdf.

Find out more about AMS prizes at http://www.ams.org/prizes-awards.

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