David Mumford Receives 2007 AMS Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition

January 8, 2007

Providence, RI:

David Mumford of Brown University has received the 2007 AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition. Presented annually by the American Mathematical Society, the Steele Prize is one of the highest distinctions in mathematics. The prize was awarded on Saturday, January 6, 2007, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The prize citation honors Mumford for "his beautiful expository accounts of a host of aspects of algebraic geometry". Among the works mentioned in the prize citation is:

The Red Book of Varieties and Schemes (Springer, 1988)

This is one of the few books that attempt to convey in pictures some of the highly abstract notions that arise in the field of algebraic geometry. In his response upon receiving the prize, Mumford recalled that some of his drawings from The Red Book were included in a collection called Five Centuries of French Mathematics. This seemed fitting, he noted: "After all, it was the French who started impressionist painting and isn't this just an impressionist scheme for rendering geometry?"

The prize citation states that, in Mumford's Red Book and in his

Abelian Varieties (Oxford University Press, 1970)

"the classical theory is beautifully intertwined with the modern theory, in a way which sharply illuminates both." The citation also recognizes the following influential works by Mumford:

Geometric Invariant Theory (Springer, 1965)

Lectures on Curves on an Algebraic Surface (Princeton University Press, 1966)

Curves and their Jacobians (University of Michigan Press, 1975)

Complex Projective Varieties (Springer, 1976)

The prize citation concludes: "All of these books are, and will remain for the foreseeable future, classics to which the reader returns over and over."

David Mumford received the Fields Medal, the world's highest honor in mathematics, in 1974. In the mid-1980s, after more than two decades of outstanding work in algebraic geometry, he switched research areas and nowadays works on constructing mathematical models for the understanding of visual perception. His focus here has been the modeling of vision by computer and in the animal brain, especially statistical models.

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

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