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Prizes and Awards at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Phoenix

Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics

Thomas Garrity 
Thomas Garrity was one of three winners of the Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics. In his acceptance, Garrity described himself as “the William Shatner of mathematics: a smidgeon of talent and a huge number of lucky breaks.”
Andrew Chiang-Fung Liu 
Andrew Chiang-Fung Liu was one of three winners of the Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics. He began his response by saying “I think I’m entitled to a rebuttal.” For more on the Haimo Award winners, see the November issue of FOCUS.
Olympia Nicodemi 
Olympia Nicodemi was one of three winners of the Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics. In her response, Nicodemi thanked her students “who have put up with all this nonsense.” She also observed that MAA President Ron Graham has (so far) failed to teach her how to juggle.

 

Section Certificate of Meritorious Service

Underwood (Woody) Dudley
Underwood (Woody) Dudley received a Certificate of Meritorious Service from the Indiana Section of the MAA. The citation noted his many years of service to the Section and to the Association at a national level. In his response, Dudley said, “I turned in my first set of grades in December 1957 (Calculus I) and my last set in May 2003 (Calculus II). Not much progress!”
Stephen Ligh
Stephen Ligh received a Certificate of Meritorious Service from the Louisiana-Mississippi Section of the MAA. The citation noted, in particular, Ligh’s work in establishing the Student Team Competition in 1988 and running it until his retirement in 1997. Ligh has also received his section’s Distinguished Teaching Award.
Richard Barlow
Richard Barlow received a Certificate of Meritorious Service from the Nebraska-Southeast South Dakota Section of the MAA. The citation noted his many years of service as Section officer, chair, meeting host, and newsletter editor.

 

Section Certificate of Meritorious Service

Thomas Hern
Thomas A. Hern received a Certificate of Meritorious Service from the Ohio Section of the MAA. The citation noted his work as Section President, his work on many committees, his work on the section web site, and finally as Governor. It also pointed out that Hern was a member of an MAA Delegation to the People’s Republic of China in 1983.

 

Section Certificate of Meritorious Service

John Kenelly
John W. Kenelly received a Certificate of Meritorious Service from the Southeastern Section of the MAA. Currently the Treasurer of the Association, Kenelly has served both his Section and the MAA in many ways: as a leader in the reform of teaching and the use of technology in the classroom, as a fund raiser, and by his work as an officer and a member of many committees.

 

Levi L. Conant Prize

Noam Elkies
Noam Elkies received the Levi L. Conant Prize from the AMS for his two-part article “Lattices, Linear Codes, and Invariants,” which appeared in the October and November 2000 issues of the Notices of the AMS. In his response, Elkies expressed the hope that the prize would encourage more people to actually read the article.

 

Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research

Lawrence C. Evans
Lawrence C. Evans (pictured) and Nicolai V. Krylov (who was unable to attend) jointly received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research for their work on the Evans-Krylov Theorem. The citation added that “while the Steele Prize for Seminal Research is explicitly awarded for the named works, it is noted that both recipients have made a variety of distinguished contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations.”

 

Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition

John W. Milnor
John W. Milnor was the winner of the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition, awarded by the AMS “in recognition of a lifetime of expository contributions.” In his response, Milnor said that he has “always suspected that the key to the most interesting exposition is the choice of a subject that the author doesn’t understand too well. I have the unfortunate difficulty that it is almost impossible for me to understand a complicated argument unless I try to write it down.”

 

Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement

Cathleen Synge Morawetz
Cathleen Synge Morawetz received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the AMS. She was honored for her research on partial differential equations and applied mathematics, for offering “guidance and inspiration” to many graduate students, visitors, and post-docs, and for her leadership within the mathematics community, which included a term as president of the AMS. In her response, Morawetz thanked, among others, her high school mathematics teacher, “Buckshot” Reynolds.

 

Yueh-Gin Gung and Dr. Charles Y. Hu Award for Distinguished Service for Mathematics

T. Christine Stevens
T. Christine Stevens received the Yueh-Gin Gung and Dr. Charles Y. Hu Award for Distinguished Service for Mathematics, the highest honor offered by the MAA, to a standing ovation from NExT fellows old and new. Stevens has had a long and productive career that included many forms of service to mathematics, but it is as co-creator and director of Project NExT that she has had the most impact. In her acceptance, Stevens noted that her advisor, Andrew Gleason, had also received this award (in 1996), making them the only advisor-advisee pair to have received the award (so far!). A fuller account of Stevens’ work and influence will appear in the American Mathematical Monthly.

 

Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics

James A. Sethian
James A. Sethian received the Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics, sponsored jointly by SIAM and the AMS, “for his seminal work on the computer representation of the motion of curves, surfaces, interfaces, and wave fronts, and for his brilliant applications of mathematical and computational ideas to problems in science and engineering.” In his response, Sethian mentioned that his high school teacher once called him aside to point out that he was pretty good at mathematics, almost as good as the kid sitting next to him. This other kid was Eric Schmidt, currently the CEO of Google. He also pointed out that “there are closet mathematicians everywhere” and urged his hearers to speak to them. Indeed, the citation noted that Sethian’s work is noteworthy in that it goes all the way from the formulation of a mathematical model to concrete applications in laboratory and industrial settings.

 

AMS Award for Distinguished Public Service

Richard A. Tapia
Richard A. Tapia received the AMS Award for Distinguished Public Service “for inspiring thousands of people (from elementary school students to senior citizens) to study and appreciate the mathematical sciences” and for his dedication to “opening doors for underrepresented minorities and women.” In his response, Tapia noted that he often visits elementary school classrooms full of bright and interested students, and is saddened to think that a great proportion of those who are African-American or Latino will never graduate from high school. He argued that this statistic should be a call to action.

 

Louise Hay Award for Contributions to Mathematics Education

Bozenna Pasik-Duncan Bozenna
Pasik-Duncan received the Louise Hay Award for Contributions to Mathematics Education from the AWM. The award recognizes outstanding achievement in any area of mathematics education. Pasik-Duncan was honored for a wide range of education-related activities, from teaching elementary school students to working with undergraduates on research projects. She dedicated her award to those research mathematicians who teach honors introductory courses in mathematics.

 

Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry

David Gabai
David Gabai received the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry from the AMS for his work in geometric topology, in particular the topology of three-dimensional manifolds. In his response, Gabai noted that much of his work was based on and inspired by the work of former winners of a Veblen Prize, and said that “It is humbling to be the recipient of the 2004 Veblen Prize.”

 

Alice T. Shafer Prize for Excellence in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Woman

Kimberly Spears
Kimberly Spears received the Alice T. Shafer Prize for Excellence in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Woman from the AWM. Spears is a senior at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In addition to performing brilliantly in her classes, she has done two significant research projects: a generalization of the Quadratic Reciprocity Law to non-abelian groups and a result showing that assuming standard conjectures about the connection of zeros of zeta and L-functions to the Grand Unitary Ensemble allows one to classify discriminants d whose corresponding quadratic number fields have one ideal class per genus.

 

E. H. Moore Research Article Prize

Mark Haiman
Mark Haiman received the E. H. Moore Research Article Prize from the AMS for his paper on “Hilbert Schemes, Polygraphs, and the Macdonald Positivity Conjecture,” which appeared in the Journal of the AMS 14 (2001), 941–1006. The prize is for an outstanding research article appearing in one of the AMS journals over a six-year period.

 

Click here for the article on the winner and runner-up of the Morgan Prize

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4162
News Date: 
Friday, January 23, 2004