News Release

Phillips Receives AMS Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement

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---Ralph S. Phillips, professor of mathematics at Stanford University, has received the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement. 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.

According to the committee selecting him for the prize, Professor Phillips is "one of the outstanding analysts of our time." His early work was in functional analysis, and he also made major contributions to acoustical scattering theory in joint work with Peter Lax. Some aspects of this work led to collaboration between Professor Phillips and Peter Sarnak on problems related to number theory and geometry. In the last fifteen years, Professor Phillips has done brilliant work, in collaboration with others, on a variety of important questions in mathematical analysis.

Professor Phillips was born on June 23, 1913, in Oakland, California. He received his A.B. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1935 and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1939. He taught at the University of Washington and Harvard University before becoming the leader of a research group at the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1942-1946). He held positions at New York University, the University of Southern California, and at the University of California, Los Angeles, before moving to Stanford in 1960. Professor Phillips was a Guggenheim Fellow (1954 and 1974). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971.

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.