Bôcher Memorial Prize

This prize, the first to be offered by the AMS,  was founded in memory of Professor Maxime Bôcher, who served as President of the AMS 1909-1910.  The original endowment was contributed by members of the Society. It is awarded for a notable paper in analysis published during the preceding six years.  To be eligible, the author should be a member of the American Mathematical Society or the paper should have been published in a recognized North American journal.  Currently, the US$5,000 prize is awarded every three years.

Next award:  January 2011.

 Twenty-first award, 2008:  To Alberto Bressan for his fundamental works on hyperbolic conservation laws; and to Charles Fefferman for his many fundamental contributions to different areas of analysis; and to Carlos Kenig for his important contributions to harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, and nonlinear dispersive PDE.

Twentieth award, 2005 :   To Frank Merle for his fundamental work in the analysis of nonlinear dispersive equations.  

Nineteenth award, 2002 : To Daniel Tataru for his fundamental paper “On global existence and scattering for the wave maps equations”, Amer. Jour. of Math. 123 (2001) no. 1, 37–77; and to Terence Tao for his recent fundamental breakthrough on the problem of critical regularity in Sobolev spaces of the wave maps equations, “Global regularity of wave maps I. Small critical Sobolev norm in high dimensions”, Int. Math. Res. Notices (2001), no.6, 299–328 and “Global regularity of wave maps II. Small energy in two dimensions”, to appear in Comm. Math. Phys. (2001 or early 2002); and to Fanghua Lin for his fundamental contributions to our understanding of the Ginzburg-Landau (GL) equations with a small parameter.

Eighteenth award, 1999 : To Demetrios Christodoulou for his contributions to the mathematical theory of general relativity, and to Sergiu Klainerman for his contributions to nonlinear hyperbolic equations, and to Thomas Wolff for his work in harmonic analysis.

Seventeenth award, 1994: To Leon Simon for his profound contributions toward understanding the structure of singular sets for solutions of variational problems.

Sixteenth award, 1989: To Richard M. Schoen for his work on the application of partial differential equations to differential geometry, in particular his completion of the solution to the Yamabe Problem in Conformal deformation of a Riemannian metric to constant scalar curvature, Journal of Differential Geometry, volume 20 (1984), pp. 479-495.

Fifteenth award, 1984: To Richard B. Melrose for his solution of several outstanding problems in diffraction theory and scattering theory and for developing the analytical tools needed for their resolution.

Fourteenth award, 1984: To Luis A. Caffarelli for his deep and fundamental work in nonlinear partial differential equations, in particular his work on free boundary problems, vortex theory and regularity theory.

Thirteenth award, 1979: To Alberto P. Calderón in recognition of his fundamental work on the theory of singular integrals and partial differential equations, and in particular for his paper Cauchy integrals on Lipschitz curves and related operators, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, volume 74 (1977), pp. 1324-1327.

Twelfth award, 1974: To Donald S. Ornstein in recognition of his paper, Bernoulli shifts with the same entropy are isomorphic, Advances in Mathematics, volume 4 (1970), pp. 337-352.

Eleventh award, 1969: To I. M. Singer in recognition of his work on the index problem, especially his share in two joint papers with Michael F. Atiyah, The index of elliptic operators. I, III, Annals of Mathematics, Series 2, volume 87 (1968), pp. 484-530, 546-604.

Tenth award, 1964: To Paul J. Cohen for his paper, On a conjecture of Littlewood and idempotent measures, American Journal of Mathematics, volume 82 (1960), pp. 191-212.

Ninth award, 1959: To Louis Nirenberg for his work in partial differential equations.

Eighth award, 1953: To Norman Levinson for his contributions to the theory of linear, nonlinear, ordinary, and partial differential equations contained in his papers of recent years.

Seventh award, 1948: To A. C. Schaeffer and D. C. Spencer for their memoir, Coefficients of schlicht functions. I, II, III, IV, Duke Mathematical Journal, volume 10 (1943), pp. 611-635, volume 12 (1945), pp. 107-125, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, volume 32 (1946), pp. 111-116, volume 35 (1949), pp. 143-150.

Sixth award, 1943: To Jesse Douglas for his memoirs, Green's function and the problem of Plateau, American Journal of Mathematics, volume 61 (1939), pp. 545-589; The most general form of the problem of Plateau, American Journal of Mathematics, volume 61(1939), pp. 590-608; and Solution of the inverse problem of the calculus of variations, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, volume 25 (1939), pp. 631-637.

Fifth award, 1938: To John von Neumann for his memoir, Almost periodic functions and groups. I, II, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, volume 36 (1934), pp. 445-492, and volume 37 (1935), pp. 21-50.

Fourth award, 1933: To Marston Morse for his memoir, The foundations of a theory of the calculus of variations in the large in m-space, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, volume 31 (1929), pp. 379-404; and to Norbert Wiener for his memoir, Tauberian theorems, Annals of Mathematics, Series 2, volume 33 (1932),pp. 1-100.

Third award, 1928: To J. W. Alexander for his memoir, Combinatorial analysis situs, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, volume 28 (1926), pp. 301-329.

Second award, 1924: To E. T. Bell for his memoir, Arithmetical paraphrases. I, II, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, volume 22 (1921), pp. 1-30, 198-219; and to Solomon Lefschetz for his memoir, On certain numerical invariants with applications to Abelian varieties, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, volume 22 (1921), pp. 407-482.

First (preliminary) award, 1923: To G. D. Birkhoff for his memoir, Dynamical systems with two degrees of freedom. Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, volume 18 (1917), pp. 199-300.