Browse Prizes and Awards

The 2024 Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement is awarded to Haïm Brezis for his outstanding and seminal contributions in several fields of Nonlinear Functional Analysis and Partial Differential Equations, and for his remarkable influence in mathematics, in particular through his exceptional training of PhD students.

Prize announcement as seen in the news release.

Nicholas M. Katz, Princeton University, will receive the 2023 AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement for his landmark contributions to number theory and arithmetic geometry.

Prize announcement as seen in the news release.

Richard P. Stanley, an emeritus professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will receive the 2022 AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Stanley has revolutionized enumerative combinatorics, revealing deep connections with other branches of mathematics, such as commutative algebra, topology, algebraic geometry, probability, convex geometry, and representation theory. In doing so, he solved important longstanding combinatorial problems, often reinvigorating these other fields with new combinatorial methods. Through his outstanding research; excellent expository works; and many PhD students, collaborators and colleagues, he continues to influence the field of combinatorics worldwide.

Prize announcement as seen in the news release.

The 2021 Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement is awarded to Spencer Bloch for his seminal contributions linking algebraic geometry, algebraic K-theory, arithmetic and Hodge theory. Bloch's ideas pervade modern thinking on these subjects, and laid the groundwork in both techniques and framework for many of the most exciting developments in these areas.

Prize announcement as seen in the news release.

The 2020 Lifetime Achievement Prize is awarded to Karen Uhlenbeck for her long-lasting influence in geometric topology and analysis and for her mentorship of young people and women in mathematics. Her mathematics has laid the foundation for a tremendous range of research in differential geometry and geometric analysis over the past four decades.

Prize announcement as seen in the news release.

Awarded to Jeff Cheeger for his fundamental contributions to geometric analysis and their far-reaching influence on related areas of mathematics.

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

Awarded to Jean Bourgain for the breadth of his contributions made in the advancement of mathematics.

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

Awarded to James Arthur for his fundamental contributions to number theory and harmonic analysis, and in particular for his proof of the Arthur-Selberg trace formula.

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

Awarded to Barry Simon for his impact on the education and research of a generation of mathematical scientists through his significant research achievements, his highly influential books, and his mentoring of graduate students and postdocs.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

Awarded to Victor Kac for his groundbreaking contributions to Lie Theory and its applications to Mathematics and Mathematical Physics.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

Awarded to Philip A. Griffiths for his contributions to our fundamental knowledge in mathematics, particularly algebraic geometry, differential geometry, and differential equations.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

"for his pivotal role in shaping the theory of dynamical systems and for his groundbreaking contributions to ergodic theory, probability theory, statistical mechanics, and mathematical physics"

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Ivo M. Babuška for his many pioneering advances in the numerical solution of partial differential equations over the last half century.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To John W. Milnor for standing out from the list of great mathematicians in terms of his overall achievements and his influence on mathematics in general, both through his work and through his excellent books.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To William Fulton for playing a pivotal role in shaping the direction of algebraic geometry, forging and strengthening ties between algebraic geometry and adjacent fields, and teaching and mentoring several generations of younger mathematicians.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Luis Caffarelli, one of the world's greatest mathematicians studying nonlinear partial differential equations (PDE).

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To George Lusztig for entirely reshaping representation theory, and, in the process, changing much of mathematics.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Henry P. McKean for his rich and magnificent mathematical career and for his work in analysis, which has a strong orientation towards probability theory.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Frederick W. Gehring for being a leading figure in the theory of quasiconformal mappings for over fifty years; and to Dennis P. Sullivan for his fundamental contributions to many branches of mathematics.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Israel M. Gelfand for profoundly influencing many fields of research through his own work and through his interactions with other mathematicians and students.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Cathleen Synge Morawetz for greatly influencing mathematics in the broad sense throughout her long and distinguished career.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Ron Graham for being one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years; and to Victor Guillemin for playing a critical role in the development of a number of important areas in analysis and geometry.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Michael Artin for helping to weave the fabric of modern algebraic geometry, and to Elias Stein for making fundamental contributions to different branches of analysis.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Harry Kesten for his many and deep contributions to probability theory and its applications.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Isadore M. Singer. Singer's series of five papers with Michael F. Atiyah on the Index Theorem for elliptic operators (which appeared in 1968-71) and his three papers with Atiyah and V.K. Patodi on the Index Theorem for manifolds with boundary (which appeared in 1975-76) are among the great classics of global analysis.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Richard V. Kadison. For almost half a century, Professor Kadison has been one of the world leaders in the subject of operator algebras, and the tremendous flourishing of this subject in the last thirty years is largely due to his efforts.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Nathan Jacobson for his many contributions to research, teaching, exposition, and the mathematical profession. Few mathematicians have been as productive over such a long career or have had as much influence on the profession as has Professor Jacobson.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Ralph S. Phillips for being one of the outstanding analysts of our time. His early work was in functional analysis: his beautiful theorem on the relation between the spectrum of a semigroup and its infinitesimal generator is striking as well as very useful in the study of PDEs. His extension theory for dissipative linear operators predated the interpolation approach to operator theory and robust control. He made major contributions to acoustical scattering theory in his joint work with Peter Lax, proving remarkable results on local energy decay and the connections between poles of the scattering matrix and the analytic properties of the resolvent. He later extended this work to a spectral theory for the automorphic Laplace operator, relying on the Radon transform on horospheres to avoid Eisenstein series. In the last fifteen years, Ralph Phillips has done brilliant work, in collaboration with others, on spectral theory for the Laplacian on symmetric spaces, on the existence and stability of cusp forms for general noncompact quotients of the hyperbolic plane, on the explicit construction of sparse optimal expander graphs, and on the structure of families of isospectral sets in two dimensions (the collection of drums that sound the same).

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Goro Shimura for his important and extensive work on arithmetical geometry and automorphic forms; concepts introduced by him were often seminal, and fertile ground for new developments, as witnessed by the many notations in number theory that carry his name and that have long been familiar to workers in the field.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To John T. Tate for scientific accomplishments spanning four and a half decades. He has been deeply influential in many of the important developments in algebra, algebraic geometry, and number theory during this time.

Prize announcement as seen in Notices of the AMS.

To Louis Nirenberg for his numerous basic contributions to linear and nonlinear partial differential equations and their application to complex analysis and differential geometry.

To Eugene B. Dynkin for his foundational contributions to Lie algebras and probability theory over a long period and his production of outstanding research students in both Russia and the United States, countries to whose mathematical life he has contributed so richly.