Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry

This prize was established in 1961 in memory of Professor Oswald Veblen through a fund contributed by former students and colleagues. The fund was later doubled by the widow of Professor Veblen. It is awarded in recognition of a notable research memoir in geometry or topology published in the preceding six years.  To be considered, either the nominee should be a member of the Society or the memoir should have been published in a recognized North American journal.  Currently, the US$5,000 prize is awarded every three years.

Next award:  January 2010.  Call for nominations.

Sixteenth award, 2007 :  To Peter Kronheimer and Tomasz Mrowka for their joint contributions to both three- and four-dimensional topology through the development of deep analytical techniques and applications; and to Peter Ozsváth and Zoltán Szabó for their contributions to 3- and 4-dimensional topology through their Heegaard Floer homology theory.

Fifteenth award, 2004 : To David Gabai for his work in geometric topology, in particular, the topology of 3-dimensional manifolds.

Fourteenth award, 2001 : To Jeff Cheeger for his work in differential geometry, to Yakov Eliashberg for his work in symplectic and contact topology, and to Michael J. Hopkins for his work in homotopy theory.

Thirteenth award, 1996 : To Richard Hamilton for his continuing study of the Ricci flow and related parabolic equations for a Riemannian metric, and to Gang Tian for his contributions to geometric analysis.

Twelfth award, 1991: To Andrew J. Casson for his work on the topology of low-dimensional manifolds, and to Clifford H. Taubes for his foundational work in Yang-Mills theory.

Eleventh award, 1986: To Michael H. Freedman for his work in differential geometry and, in particular, the solution of the four-dimensional Poincar???onjecture.

Tenth award, 1981: To Shing-Tung Yau for his work in nonlinear partial differential equations, his contributions to the topology of differentiable manifolds, and for his work on the complex Monge-Amp??? equation on compact complex manifolds.

Ninth award, 1981: To Mikhael Gromov for his work relating topological and geometric properties of Riemannian manifolds.

Eighth award, 1976: To James Simons for his work on minimal varieties and characteristic forms.

Seventh award, 1976: To William P. Thurston for his work on foliations.

Sixth award, 1971: To Dennis P. Sullivan for his work on the Hauptvermutung summarized in the paper,On the Hauptvermutung for manifolds, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, volume 73 (1967), pp. 598-600.

Fifth award, 1971: To Robion C. Kirby for his paper, Stable homeomorphisms and the annulus conjecture, Annals of Mathematics, Series 2, volume 89 (1969), pp.575-582.

Fourth award, 1966: To Morton Brown and Barry Mazur for their work on the generalized Schoenflies theorem.

Third award, 1966: To Stephen Smale for his contributions to various aspects of differential topology.

Second award, 1964: To Raoul Bott for his papers, The space of loops on a Lie group, Michigan Mathematical Journal, volume 5 (1958), pp. 35-61, and The stable homotopy of the classical groups, Annals of Mathematics, Series 2, volume 70 (1959), pp. 313-337.

First award, 1964: To C. D. Papakyriakopoulos for his papers, On Solid Tori, Annals of Mathematics, Series 2, volume 66 (1957), pp. 1-26, and On Dehn's lemma and the asphericity of knots, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, volume 43 (1957), pp. 169-172.