Browse Prizes and Awards

The 2024 Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research is awarded jointly to József Balogh, Robert Morris, and Wojciech Samotij for their 2015 paper "Independent sets in hypergraphs," published in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society, and to David Saxton and Andrew Thomason for their 2015 paper "Hypergraph Containers," published in Inventiones Mathematicae.

Prize announcement as seen in the news release.

The 2023 Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research is awarded to Peter B. Kronheimer of Harvard University and Tomasz S. Mrowka of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for their paper "Gauge theory for embedded surfaces, I, published in 1993 in Topology 32, 773-826.

Prize announcement as seen in the news release.

The 2022 Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research is awarded to Michel Goemans and David Williamson for their paper "Improved Approximation Algorithms for Maximum Cut and Satisfiability Problems Using Semidefinite Programming" published in 1995 in the Journal of the ACM. This paper, which focused on the Max-Cut problem, a core problem in combinatorial optimization, has had major, sustained impact on the fields of theoretical computer science and optimization theory.

The 2021 Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research is awarded to Murray Gerstenhaber for The cohomology structure of an associative ring, Ann. Math. 78 (1963), 267-288 and On the deformation of rings and algebras, Ann. Math. 79 (1964), 59-103. These two remarkable Annals of Mathematics papers established the foundations of algebraic deformation theory, developing a rich structure on the Hochschild cohomology. These papers have had and continue to have a huge impact on many areas of mathematics and physics, including higher algebra and deformation quantization.

Prize announcement as seen in the news release.

The 2020 Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research in Analysis/Probability Theory is awarded to Craig Tracy and Harold Widom for the paper "Level-spacing distributions and the Airy kernel," published in 1994 in Communications in Mathematical Physics.

Prize announcement as seen in the news release.

Haruzo Hida will receive the 2019 Seminal Contribution to Research Prize for his highly original paper, "Galois representations into GL₂(Z_p[[X]]) attached to ordinary cusp forms," published in 1986 in Inventiones Mathematicae.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS and in the news release.

Awarded to Sergey Fomin and Andrei Zelevinsky (posthumously) for their paper "Cluster algebras I: Foundations," published in 2002 in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS and in the news release.

Awarded to Andrew J. Majda for two papers published in the Memoirs of the AMS in 1983: "The existence of multidimensional shock fronts," Vol 43, Number 281, and "The stability of multidimensional shock fronts," Vol 41, Number 275.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

Awarded to Rostislav Grigorchuk for his influential paper "Degrees of growth of finitely generated groups and the theory of invariant means," which appeared in Russian in 1984 in Izvestiya Akademii Nauk SSSR. Seriya Matematicheskaya and in English translation a year later. The paper stands as a landmark in the development of the now-burgeoning area of geometric group theory.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

Awarded to Luis Caffarelli, Robert Kohn, and Louis Nirenberg for their paper, "Partial regularity of suitable weak solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations." Communications Pure and Applied Math, vol 35 no 6, 771-831 (1982).

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

For his book, Classification Theory and the Number of Nonisomorphic Models (Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, 92, North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam-New York, 1978; 2nd edition, 1990).

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To William Thurston for his contributions to low dimensional topology, and in particular for a series of highly original papers, starting with "Hyperbolic structures on 3-manifolds. I. Deformation of acylindrical manifolds" (Ann. of Math. (2) 124 (1986), no. 2, 203-246), that revolutionized 3-manifold theory.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Ingrid Daubechies for her paper, "Orthonormal bases of compactly supported wavelets" (Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, 41 (1988), no. 7, 909-996).

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Robert L. Griess Jr. for his construction of the "Monster" sporadic finite simple group, which he first announced in "A construction of F1 as automorphisms of a 196,883-dimensional algebra" (Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 78 (1981), no. 2, part 1, 686-691) with details published in "The friendly giant" (Invent. Math. 69 (1982), no. 1, 1-102).

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Richard Hamilton for his paper "Three-manifolds with positive Ricci curvature," J. Differential Geom. 17 (1982), 255-306.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Endre Szemerédi for his paper "On sets of integers containing no k elements in arithmetic progression", Acta Arithmetica XXVII (1975), 199-245.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Karen Uhlenbeck for her foundational contributions in analytic aspects of mathematical gauge theory. These results appeared in the two papers: "Removable singularities in Yang-Mills fields", Communications in Mathematical Physics, 83 (1982), 11-29 and "Connections with L:P bounds on curvature", Communications in Mathematical Physics, 83 (1982), 31-42.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Clifford S. Gardner, John M. Greene, Martin D. Kruskal, and Robert M. Miura for their paper "KortewegdeVries equation and generalizations. VI. Methods for exact solution", Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 27 (1974), 97-133.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Robert P. Langlands for his paper "Problems in the theory of automorphic forms," (Springer Lecture Notes in Math. 170 (1970), 18-86). This is the paper that introduced what are now known as the Langlands conjectures.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Lawrence C. Evans and Nicolai V. Krylov for the "Evans-Krylov theorem" as first established in the papers: Lawrence C. Evans, "Classical solutions of fully nonlinear convex, second order elliptic equations", Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 35 (1982), no. 3, 333-363; and N. V. Krylov, "Boundedly inhomogeneous elliptic and parabolic equations", Izvestiya Akad. Nauk SSSR, ser. mat. 46 (1982), no. 3, 487-523; and translated in Mathematics of the USSR, Izvestiya 20 (1983), no. 3, 459-492.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Ronald Jensen for his paper "The fine structure of the constructible hierarchy" (Annals of Mathematical Logic 4 (1972) 229-308); and to Michael Morley for his paper "Categoricity in power" (Transactions of the AMS 114 (1965) 514-538).

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Mark Goresky and Robert MacPherson for the papers, "Intersection homology theory", Topology 19 (1980), no. 2, 135-62 (IH1) and "Intersection homology. II", Invent. Math. 72 (1983), no. 1, 77-129 (IH2).

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Leslie F. Greengard and Vladimir Rokhlin for the paper "A fast algorithm for particle simulations", J. Comput. Phys. 73, no. 2 (1987), 325-348.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Barry Mazur for his paper "Modular curves and the Eisenstein ideal" in Publications Mathematiques de l'Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, no. 47 (1978), 33-186.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To John F. Nash for his remarkable paper: "The embedding problem for Riemannian manifolds," Ann. of Math. (2) 63 (1956) 20-63.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Herbert Wilf and Doron Zeilberger for their joint paper, "Rational functions certify combinatorial identities," Journal of the American Mathematical Society, 3 (1990) 147-158.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Mikhael Gromov for his paper, Pseudo-holomorphic curves in symplectic manifolds, Inventiones Math. 82 (1985), 307-347, which revolutionized the subject of symplectic geometry and topology and is central to much current research activity, including quantum cohomology and mirror symmetry.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Daniel Stroock and S.R.S. Varadhan for their four papers: Diffusion processes with continuous coefficients I and II, Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 22 (1969), 345-400, 479-530; On the support of diffusion processes with applications to the strong maximum principle, Sixth Berkeley Sympos. Math. Statist. Probab., vol. III, 1970, pp. 333-360; Diffusion processes with boundary conditions, Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 34 (1971), 147-225; Multidimensional diffusion processes, Springer-Verlag, 1979.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Edward Nelson for the following two papers in mathematical physics characterized by leaders of the field as extremely innovative: A quartic interaction in two dimensions in Mathematical Theory of Elementary Particles, MIT Press, 1966, pages 69-73; and Construction of quantum fields from Markoff fields in Journal of Functional Analysis, 12 (1973), 97-112. In these papers he showed for the first time how to use the powerful tools of probability theory to attack the hard analytic questions of constructive quantum field theory, controlling renormalizations with L^p estimates in the first paper, and in the second turning Euclidean quantum field theory into a subset of the theory of stochastic processes.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Louis de Branges for his proof of the Bieberbach Conjecture.

To George Daniel Mostow for his paper Strong rigidity of locally symmetric spaces, Annals of Mathematics Studies, number 78, Princeton University Press (1973).