Former Members Awarded 2017 AMS Prizes

Former Members in the School of Mathematics will receive several major prizes from the American Mathematical Society.

John Friedlander (Member 1972–74, 1983–84, 1995, 1999–2000, 2004, 2009) and Henryk Iwaniec (Member 1983–84, 1984–86) will receive the 2017 AMS Doob Prize for their book Opera de Cribro, a work on prime numbers. The work was noted by the prize committee for its high-quality writing, clear explanations, and numerous examples, which “distinguish this unique monograph from anything that had been written before on the subject and lift it to the level of a true masterpiece."

Dusa McDuff, a frequent Member and Visitor who has long been affiliated with the Institute's Program for Women in Mathematics, and collaborator Dietmar Salamon will receive the 2017 AMS Steele Prize for Exposition for their book J-holomorphic Curves and Symplectic Topology, a comprehensive introduction to Gromov's theory of J-holomorphic curves that “has since served as the most standard and undisputed reference in the field and as the main textbook for graduate students and others entering the field.”

Leon Simon (Member 1979–80; Visitor 1982–83, 1984) will receive the 2017 AMS Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research. Simon is cited for “his fundamental contributions to Geometric Analysis and in particular for his 1983 paper ‘Asymptotics for a Class of Non-Linear Evolution Equations, with Applications to Geometric Problems,’ published in the Annals of Mathematics.”

László Erdős (Member 2013–14) and Horng-Tzer Yau (Member 1987–88, 2003; Visitor 1991) will receive the 2017 Leonard Eisenbud Prize for Mathematics and Physics. The two are honored “for proving the universality of eigenvalue statistics of Wigner random matrices.” Presented every three years, the AMS Eisenbud Prize recognizes a work or group of works that brings mathematics and physics closer together.

For more information on the 2017 AMS prizes and winners, see www.ams.org/news/ams-news-releases/ams-news-releases.