The Leroy P. Steele Prizes are awarded every year by the American Mathematical Society, for distinguished research work and writing in the field of mathematics. Since 1993, there has been a formal division into three categories.
The prizes have been given since 1970, from a bequest of Leroy P. Steele, and were set up in honor of George David Birkhoff, William Fogg Osgood and William Caspar Graustein. The way the prizes are awarded was changed in 1976 and 1993, but the initial aim of honoring expository writing as well as research has been retained. The prizes of $5,000 are not given on a strict national basis, but relate to mathematical activity in the USA, and writing in English (originally, or in translation).
| Year | Prizewinner | Citation |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Benson Farb and Dan Margalit | for their Princeton Mathematical Series book A Primer on Mapping Class Groups. |
| 2023 | Lawrence C. Evans | for his book Partial Differential Equations, published by the American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 1998 (first edition) and 2010 (second edition). |
| 2022 | Aise Johan de Jong | for being the originator and maintainer of the Stacks Project. |
| 2021 | Noga Alon and Joel H. Spencer | for their book The Probabilistic Method, published by Wiley & Sons Inc. in 1992. |
| 2020 | Martin R. Bridson and André Haefliger | for the book Metric Spaces of Non-positive Curvature, published by Springer-Verlag in 1999. |
| 2019 | Philippe Flajolet (posthumously) and Robert Sedgewick | for their book Analytic Combinatorics, an authoritative and highly accessible compendium of its subject, which demonstrates the deep interface between combinatorial mathematics and classical analysis. |
| 2018 | Martin Aigner and Günter M. Ziegler | for their book Proofs from THE BOOK. |
| 2017 | Dusa McDuff and Dietmar Salamon | for their book J-holomorphic Curves and Symplectic Topology (AMS Colloquium Publications, 52, 2004; second edition 2012) |
| 2016 | David A. Cox, John Little and Donal O'Shea | for their book Ideals, Varieties, and Algorithms, which has made algebraic geometry and computational commutative algebra accessible not just to mathematicians but to students and researchers in many fields. |
| 2015 | Robert Lazarsfeld | for his books Positivity in Algebraic Geometry I and II, published in 2004. These books were instant classics that have profoundly influenced and shaped research in algebraic geometry over the past decade. |
| 2014 | Yuri Burago, Dmitri Burago, Sergei Ivanov | awarded to Yuri Burago, Dmitri Burago, and Sergei Ivanov for their book A Course in Metric Geometry, in recognition of excellence in exposition and promotion of fruitful ideas in geometry. |
| 2013 | John Guckenheimer, Philip Holmes | in recognition of their book Nonlinear Oscillations, Dynamical Systems, and Bifurcations of Vector Fields (Applied Mathematical Sciences, 42, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1983; reprinted with revisions and corrections, 1990). |
| 2012 | Michael Aschbacher, Richard Lyons, Steve Smith, Ronald Solomon | for their work The classification of finite simple groups: groups of characteristic 2 type, Mathematical Surveys and Monographs, 172, American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 2011. |
| 2011 | Henryk Iwaniec | for his long record of excellent exposition, both in books and in classroom notes. |
| 2010 | David Eisenbud | for his book Commutative Algebra: With a View Toward Algebraic Geometry (Graduate Texts in Mathematics, 150, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1995. xvi+785 pp.) |
| 2009 | I.G. Macdonald | for his book Symmetric Functions and Hall Polynomials (second edition, Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1995). |
| 2008 | Neil Trudinger | for his book Elliptic Partial Differential Equations of Second Order, written with the late David Gilbarg. |
| 2007 | David Mumford | for his beautiful expository accounts of a host of aspects of algebraic geometry, including The Red Book of Varieties and Schemes (Springer, 1988). |
| 2006 | Lars Hörmander | for his book, The Analysis of Linear Partial Differential Operators. |
| 2005 | Branko Grünbaum | for his book, Convex Polytopes. |
| 2004 | John Milnor | in recognition of a lifetime of expository contributions ranging across a wide spectrum of disciplines including topology, symmetric bilinear forms, characteristic classes, Morse theory, game theory, algebraic K-theory, iterated rational maps...and the list goes on. |
| 2003 | John B. Garnett | for his book, Bounded Analytic Functions (Pure and Applied Mathematics, 96, Academic Press, Inc. [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers], New York-London, 1981, xvi + 467 pp.) |
| 2002 | Yitzhak Katznelson | for his book An Introduction to Harmonic Analysis. |
| 2001 | Richard Stanley | in recognition of the completion of his two-volume work Enumerative Combinatorics. |
| 2000 | John H. Conway | in recognition of his many expository contributions in automata, the theory of games, lattices, coding theory, group theory, and quadratic forms. |
| 1999 | Serge Lang | for his many mathematics books. Among Lang's most famous texts are Algebra [Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1965; Second edition, 1984; Third edition, 1993, ISBN 0-201-55540-9] and Algebraic Number Theory [Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1970; Second edition, Graduate Texts in Mathematics, 110, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1994, ISBN 0-387-94225-4]. |
| 1998 | Joseph H. Silverman | for his books, The Arithmetic of Elliptic Curves, Graduate Texts in Mathematics 106, Springer-Verlag, New; York-Berlin, 1986; and Advanced Topics in the Arithmetic of Elliptic Curves, Graduate Texts in Mathematics 151, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1994. |
| 1997 | Anthony W. Knapp | for his book Representation Theory of Semisimple Groups (An overview based on examples), Princeton University Press, 1986, a beautifully written book which starts from scratch but takes the reader far into a highly developed subject. |
| 1996 | Bruce Berndt | for the four volumes, Ramanujan's Notebooks, Parts I, II, III, and IV (Springer, 1985, 1989, 1991, and 1994). |
| 1996 | William Fulton | for his book Intersection Theory, Springer-Verlag, "Ergebnisse series," 1984. |
| 1995 | Jean-Pierre Serre | for his 1970 book Cours d'Arithmétique, with its English translation, published in 1973 by Springer Verlag, A Course in Arithmetic. |
| 1994 | Ingrid Daubechies | for her book Ten Lectures on Wavelets (CBMS 61, SIAM, 1992, ISBN 0-8987-1274-2). |
| 1993 | Walter Rudin | for his books Principles of Mathematical Analysis, McGraw-Hill (1953, 1964, and 1976) and Real and Complex Analysis, McGraw-Hill (1966, 1974, and 1976). |
| Year | Prizewinner | Citation |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | József Balogh, Robert Morris, and Wojciech Samotij | for their 2015 paper “Independent sets in hypergraphs,” published in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society. |
| David Saxton and Andrew Thomason | for their 2015 paper “Hypergraph Containers,” published in Inventiones Mathematicae. | |
| 2023 | Peter B. Kronheimer and Tomasz S. Mrowka | for their paper "Gauge theory for embedded surfaces, I," published in 1993 in Topology 32, 773–826. |
| 2022 | Michel Goemans and David P. Williamson | for their paper "Improved Approximation Algorithms for Maximum Cut and Satisfiability Problems Using Semidefinite Programming," (published in 1995 in the Journal of the ACM). |
| 2021 | Murray Gerstenhaber | for two papers: “The cohomology structure of an associative ring,” Ann. Math. 78 (1963), 267-288 and “On the deformation of rings and algebras,” Ann. Math. 79 (1964), 59-103. |
| 2020 | Craig Tracy and Harold Widom | for their paper "Level-spacing distributions and the Airy kernel," (published in 1994 in Communications in Mathematical Physics). |
| 2019 | Haruzo Hida | for his highly original paper "Galois representations into GL2(Zp[[X]]) attached to ordinary cusp forms," published in 1986 in Inventiones Mathematicae. |
| 2018 | Sergey Fomin, Andrei Zelevinsky | for their paper "Cluster algebras I: Foundations," published in 2002 in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society. |
| 2017 | Leon Simon | for his fundamental contributions to Geometric Analysis and in particular for his paper Simon, Leon (1983). "Asymptotics for a Class of Non-Linear Evolution Equations, with Applications to Geometric Problems". The Annals of Mathematics. 118 (3): 525. doi:10.2307/2006981. |
| 2016 | Andrew Majda | for his books "The existence of multidimensional shock fronts," Vol 43, Number 281, and "The stability of multidimensional shock fronts," Vol 41, Number 275. Both books appeared in the Memoirs of the AMS in 1983. |
| 2015 | Rostislav Grigorchuk | for his influential paper "Degrees of growth of finitely generated groups and the theory of invariant means," which appeared in Russian in 1984 in Izvestiya Akademii Nauk SSSR. Seriya Matematicheskaya and in English translation a year later. The paper stands as a landmark in the development of the now-burgeoning area of geometric group theory. |
| 2014 | Luis Caffarelli, Robert Kohn and Louis Nirenberg | for their paper, "Partial regularity of suitable weak solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations." Communications Pure and Applied Math, vol 35 no 6, 771-831 (1982). |
| 2013 | Saharon Shelah | for his book, Classification Theory and the Number of Nonisomorphic Models (Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, 92, North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam–New York, 1978; 2nd edition, 1990). |
| 2012 | William Thurston | for his contributions to low dimensional topology, and in particular for a series of highly original papers, starting with "Hyperbolic structures on 3-manifolds. I. Deformation of acylindrical manifolds" (Ann. of Math. (2) 124 (1986), no. 2, 203–246), that revolutionized 3-manifold theory. |
| 2011 | Ingrid Daubechies | for her paper, "Orthonormal bases of compactly supported wavelets" (Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, 41 (1988), no. 7, 909-996). |
| 2010 | Robert Griess | for his construction of the "Monster" sporadic finite simple group, which he first announced in "A construction of F1 as automorphisms of a 196,883-dimensional algebra" (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 78 (1981), no. 2, part 1, 686–691) with details published in "The friendly giant" (Invent. Math. 69 (1982), no. 1, 1–102). |
| 2009 | Richard S. Hamilton | for his paper "Three-manifolds with positive Ricci curvature," J. Differential Geom. 17 (1982), 255-306. |
| 2008 | Endre Szemerédi | for his paper "On sets of integers containing no k elements in arithmetic progression", Acta Arithmetica XXVII (1975), 199-245. |
| 2007 | Karen Uhlenbeck | for her foundational contributions in analytic aspects of mathematical gauge theory. These results appeared in the two papers: "Removable singularities in Yang-Mills fields", Communications in Mathematical Physics, 83 (1982), 11-29 and "Connections with L:P bounds on curvature", Communications in Mathematical Physics, 83 (1982), 31-42. |
| 2006 | Clifford S. Gardner, John M. Greene, Martin D. Kruskal, Robert M. Miura | for their paper "KortewegdeVries equation and generalizations. VI. Methods for exact solution", Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 27 (1974), 97–133. |
| 2005 | Robert P. Langlands | for his paper "Problems in the theory of automorphic forms," (Springer Lecture Notes in Math. 170 (1970), 18-86). This is the paper that introduced what are now known as the Langlands conjectures. |
| 2004 | Lawrence C. Evans and Nicolai V. Krylov | for the "Evans-Krylov theorem" as first established in the papers: Lawrence C. Evans, "Classical solutions of fully nonlinear convex, second order elliptic equations", Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 35 (1982), no. 3, 333–363; and N. V. Krylov, "Boundedly inhomogeneous elliptic and parabolic equations", Izvestiya Akad. Nauk SSSR, ser. mat. 46 (1982), no. 3, 487–523; and translated in Mathematics of the USSR, Izvestiya 20 (1983), no. 3, 459–492. |
| 2003 | Ronald Jensen and Michael Morley | for his paper "The fine structure of the constructible hierarchy" (Annals of Mathematical Logic 4 (1972) 229–308); and to Michael Morley for his paper "Categoricity in power" (Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 114 (1965) 514–538). |
| 2002 | Mark Goresky and Robert MacPherson | for the papers, "Intersection homology theory", Topology 19 (1980), no. 2, 135–62 (IH1) and "Intersection homology. II", Invent. Math. 72 (1983), no. 1, 77–129 (IH2). |
| 2001 | Leslie F. Greengard and Vladimir Rokhlin | for the paper "A fast algorithm for particle simulations", J. Comput. Phys. 73, no. 2 (1987), 325-348. |
| 2000 | Barry Mazur | for his paper "Modular curves and the Eisenstein ideal" in Publications Mathematiques de l'Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, no. 47 (1978), 33-186. |
| 1999 | Michael G. Crandall | for two seminal papers: "Viscosity solutions of Hamilton-Jacobi equations" (joint with P.-L. Lions), Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 277 (1983), 1-42, and "Generation of semi-groups of nonlinear transformations on general Banach spaces" (joint with T.M. Liggett), Amer. J. Math. 93 (1971), 265-298. |
| 1999 | John F. Nash | for his remarkable paper: "The embedding problem for Riemannian manifolds," Ann. of Math. (2) 63 (1956) 20-63. |
| 1998 | Herbert Wilf and Doron Zeilberger | for their joint paper, "Rational functions certify combinatorial identities," Journal of the American Mathematical Society, 3 (1990) 147-158. |
| 1997 | Mikhail Gromov | for his paper, Pseudo-holomorphic curves in symplectic manifolds, Inventiones Math. 82 (1985), 307-347, which revolutionized the subject of symplectic geometry and topology and is central to much current research activity, including quantum cohomology and mirror symmetry. |
| 1996 | Daniel Stroock and S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan | for their four papers: Diffusion processes with continuous coefficients I and II, Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 22 (1969), 345-400, 479-530; On the support of diffusion processes with applications to the strong maximum principle, Sixth Berkeley Sympos. Math. Statist. Probab., vol. III, 1970, pp. 333–360; Diffusion processes with boundary conditions, Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 34 (1971), 147-225; Multidimensional diffusion processes, Springer-Verlag, 1979. |
| 1995 | Edward Nelson | for the following two papers in mathematical physics characterized by leaders of the field as extremely innovative: A quartic interaction in two dimensions in Mathematical Theory of Elementary Particles, MIT Press, 1966, pages 69–73; and Construction of quantum fields from Markoff fields in Journal of Functional Analysis, 12 (1973), 97-112. In these papers he showed for the first time how to use the powerful tools of probability theory to attack the hard analytic questions of constructive quantum field theory, controlling renormalizations with L^p estimates in the first paper, and in the second turning Euclidean quantum field theory into a subset of the theory of stochastic processes. |
| 1994 | Louis de Branges | for his proof of the Bieberbach Conjecture. |
| 1993 | George Daniel Mostow | for his paper Strong rigidity of locally symmetric spaces, Annals of Mathematics Studies, number 78, Princeton University Press (1973). |