News Release

Knapp Receives AMS Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition

January 9, 1997

For more information, please contact: Allyn Jackson, telephone 401-455-4109; fax 401-331-3842; e-mail axj@ams.org.

Providence, RI---Anthony W. Knapp, a mathematician at the State University of New York in Stony Brook, has received the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition. The prize was awarded on January 9, 1997, during the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego.

This prize was established in 1970 in honor of three prominent figures in the history of mathematics in the U.S.---George David Birkhoff, William Fogg Osgood, and William Casper Graustein---and are endowed under the terms of a bequest from Leroy P. Steele. The Steele Prizes are among the most prestigious awards given for mathematical achievement.

Professor Knapp is receiving the Steele Prize for his book "Representation Theory of Semisimple Groups (An overview based on examples)", (Princeton University Press, 1986). The committee choosing him for the award calls the book "beautifully written" and says it "starts from scratch but takes the reader far into a highly developed subject." The prize committee also noted that Knapp has in recent years written other major textbooks which are "all outstanding expositions of important and difficult material."

The author of seven books, Professor Knapp was an undergraduate at Dartmouth and received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1965. After holding positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell University, he joined the mathematics faculty at SUNY Stony Brook in 1986. He has held visiting positions in universities around the world, including in Australia, Canada, China, France, India, Italy, and Sweden. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver in 1974 and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1982-1983.

Founded in 1888 to further mathematical research and scholarship, the 30,000-member AMS 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 everyday life.