Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Algebra

This prize (and the Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory ) were founded in honor of Professor Frank Nelson Cole on the occasion of his retirement as Secretary of the American Mathematical Society after twenty-five years of service and as Editor-in-Chief of the Bulletin for twenty-one years. The original fund was donated by Professor Cole from moneys presented to him on his retirement, and was augmented by contributions from members of the Society.  The fund was later doubled by his son, Charles A. Cole. The prize is for a notable paper in algebra 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 2009. Call for nominations.

Sixteenth award, 2006 : To János Kollár for his outstanding achievements in the theory of rationally connected varieties and for his illuminating work on a conjecture of Nash.

Fifteenth award, 2003 : To Hiraku Nakajima for his work in representation theory and geometry.

Fourteenth award, 2000 : To Andrei Suslin for his work on motivic cohomology, and to Aise Johan de Jong for his important work on the resolution of singularities by generically finite maps.

Thirteenth award, 1995 : To Michel Raynaud and David Harbater for their solution of Abhyankar's conjecture. This work appeared in the papers Revêtements de la droite affine en caractéristique p > 0, Invent. Math. 116 (1994) 425-462 (Raynaud), and Abhyankar's conjecture on Galois groups over curves, Invent. Math. 117 (1994) 1-25 (Harbater).

Twelfth award, 1990: To Shigefumi Mori for his outstanding work on the classification of algebraic varieties and, in particular, for his paper Flip theorem and the existence of minimal models for 3-folds, Journal of the American Mathematical Society, volume 1 (1988), pp. 117-253.

Eleventh award, 1985: To George Lusztig for his fundamental work on the representation theory of finite groups of Lie type. In particular for his contributions to the classification of the irreducible representations in characteristic zero of the groups of rational points of reductive groups over finite fields, appearing in Characters of reductive groups over finite fields, Annals of Mathematics Studies, volume 107, Princeton University Press, 1984.

Tenth award, 1980: To Michael Aschbacher for his paper, A characterization of Chevalley groups over fields of odd order, Annals of Mathematics, Series 2, volume 106 (1977), pp. 353-398; and to Melvin Hochster for his paper Topics in the homological theory of commutative rings, CBMS Regional Conference Series in Mathematics, Number 24, American Mathematical Society, 1975.

Ninth award, 1975: To Hyman Bass for his paper, Unitary algebraic K-theory, Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics, volume 343, 1973; and to Daniel G. Quillen for his paper, Higher algebraic K-theories, Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics, volume 341, 1973.

Eighth award, 1970: To John R. Stallings for his paper, On torsion-free groups with infinitely many ends, Annals of Mathematics, Series 2, volume 88 (1968), pp. 312-334; and to Richard G. Swan for his paper, Groups of cohomological dimension one, Journal of Algebra, volume 12 (1969), pp. 585-610.

Seventh award, 1965: To Walter Feit and John G. Thompson for their joint paper, Solvability of groups of odd order, Pacific Journal of Mathematics, volume 13 (1963), pp. 775-1029.

Sixth award, 1960: To Serge Lang for his paper, Unramified class field theory over function fields in several variables, Annals of Mathematics, Series 2, volume 64 (1956), pp. 285-325; and to Maxwell A. Rosenlicht for his papers, Generalized Jacobian varieties, Annals of Mathematics, Series 2, volume 59 (1954), pp. 505-530, and A universal mapping property of generalized Jacobians, Annals of Mathematics, Series 2, volume 66 (1957), pp. 80-88.

Fifth award, 1954: To Harish-Chandra for his papers on representations of semisimple Lie algebras and groups, and particularly for his paper, On some applications of the universal enveloping algebra of a semisimple Lie algebra, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, volume 70 (1951), pp. 28-96.

Fourth award, 1949: To Richard Brauer for his paper, On Artin's L-series with general group characters, Annals of Mathematics, Series 2, volume 48 (1947), pp. 502-514.

Third award, 1944: To Oscar Zariski for four papers on algebraic varieties published in the American Journal of Mathematics, volumes 61 (1939) and 62 (1940), and in the Annals of Mathematics, Series 2, volumes 40 (1939) and 41 (1940).

Second award, 1939: To A. Adrian Albert for his papers on the construction of Riemann matrices published in the Annals of Mathematics, Series 2, volume 35 (1934) and volume 36 (1935).

First award, 1928: To L. E. Dickson for his book Algebren und ihre Zahlentheorie, Orell Füssli, Zürich and Leipzig, 1927.