The Colloquium Lecture of the
American Mathematical Society
The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...
is a special annual session of lectures.
History
The origins of the Colloquium Lectures date back to the 1893 International Congress of Mathematics, held in connection with the
Chicago World's Fair, where the German mathematician
Felix Klein
Felix Christian Klein (; ; 25 April 1849 – 22 June 1925) was a German mathematician and Mathematics education, mathematics educator, known for his work in group theory, complex analysis, non-Euclidean geometry, and the associations betwe ...
gave the opening address. After the Congress, Klein was invited by one of its organiser, his former student
Henry Seely White, to deliver a two-week-long series of lectures at
Northwestern University
Northwestern University (NU) is a Private university, private research university in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Established in 1851 to serve the historic Northwest Territory, it is the oldest University charter, chartered university in ...
in
Evanston.
In February 1896, White proposed in a letter to
Thomas Fiske to repeat the experience of the Evanston lectures, by organising a series of longer talks "for increasing the utility of the
American Mathematical Society
The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...
".
[ The two of them, together with ]E. H. Moore
Eliakim Hastings Moore (; January 26, 1862 – December 30, 1932), usually cited as E. H. Moore or E. Hastings Moore, was an American mathematician.
Life
Moore, the son of a Methodist minister and grandson of US Congressman Eliakim H. Moore, di ...
, William Osgood, Frank Cole, Alexander Ziwet, and Frank Morley
Frank Morley (September 9, 1860 – October 17, 1937) was a leading mathematician, known mostly for his teaching and research in the fields of algebra and geometry. Among his mathematical accomplishments was the discovery and proof of the celeb ...
, wrote later an open letter to the AMS, asking the society to sponsor an annual week-long series of Colloquium lectures focussing on a specific mathematical area, in order to complement the traditional shorter talks.[
The first official Colloquium Lectures were held in September 1896, after the AMS Summer Meetings in ]Buffalo, New York
Buffalo is a Administrative divisions of New York (state), city in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York and county seat of Erie County, New York, Erie County. It lies in Western New York at the eastern end of Lake Erie, at the head of ...
, and consisted of two independent series of lectures given by James Pierpont and Maxime Bôcher
Maxime Bôcher (August 28, 1867 – September 12, 1918) was an American mathematician who published about 100 papers on differential equations, series, and algebra. He also wrote elementary texts such as ''Trigonometry'' and ''Analytic Geometry'' ...
. A synopse of their lectures was published in the Bulletin of the AMS; starting from the second Colloquium in 1898, the lectures have been published entirely in book form in the ''AMS Colloquium Publications'' series.
List of Colloquium Lectures
* 1896 James Pierpont (Yale University): ''Galois's theory of equations''.
* 1896 Maxime Bôcher
Maxime Bôcher (August 28, 1867 – September 12, 1918) was an American mathematician who published about 100 papers on differential equations, series, and algebra. He also wrote elementary texts such as ''Trigonometry'' and ''Analytic Geometry'' ...
(Harvard University): ''Linear differential equations and their applications''.
* 1898 William Fogg Osgood
William Fogg Osgood (March 10, 1864 – July 22, 1943) was an American mathematician.
Education and career
William Fogg Osgood was born in Boston on March 10, 1864. In 1886, he graduated from Harvard, where, after studying at the universities ...
(Harvard University): ''Selected topics in the theory of functions''.
* 1898 Arthur Gordon Webster
Arthur Gordon Webster (November 28, 1863 – May 15, 1923) was an American physicist who founded the American Physical Society.
Biography
Webster was born on November 28, 1863, at Brookline, Massachusetts, to William Edward Webster and Mary Shann ...
(Clark University): ''The partial differential equations of wave propagation''.
* 1901 Oskar Bolza
Oskar Bolza (12 May 1857 – 5 July 1942) was a German mathematician, and student of Felix Klein. He was born in Bad Bergzabern, Palatinate, then a district of Bavaria, known for his research in the calculus of variations, particularly influen ...
(University of Chicago): ''The simplest type of problems in the calculus of variations''.
* 1901 Ernest William Brown
Ernest William Brown FRS (29 November 1866 – 22 July 1938) was an English mathematician and astronomer, who spent the majority of his career working in the United States and became a naturalised American citizen in 1923.
His life's work wa ...
(Haverford College): ''Modern methods of treating dynamical problems, and in particular the problem of three bodies''.
* 1903 Henry Seely White (Northwestern University): ''Linear systems of curves on algebraic surfaces''.
* 1903 Frederick S. Woods (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): ''Forms of non-euclidean space''.
* 1903 Edward Burr Van Vleck
Edward Burr Van Vleck (June 7, 1863 – June 2, 1943) was an American mathematician.
Early life
Van Vleck was born June 7, 1863, Middletown, Connecticut. He was the son of astronomer John Monroe Van Vleck, he graduated from Wesleyan University ...
(Wesleyan University): ''Selected topics in the theory of divergent series and continued fractions''.
* 1906 E. H. Moore
Eliakim Hastings Moore (; January 26, 1862 – December 30, 1932), usually cited as E. H. Moore or E. Hastings Moore, was an American mathematician.
Life
Moore, the son of a Methodist minister and grandson of US Congressman Eliakim H. Moore, di ...
(University of Chicago): ''On the theory of bilinear functional operations''.
* 1906 Ernest Julius Wilczynski (University of California, Berkeley): ''Projective differential geometry''.
* 1906 Max Mason (Yale University): ''Selected topics in the theory of boundary value problems of differential equations''.
* 1909 Gilbert Ames Bliss
Gilbert Ames Bliss, (May, 9 1876 – May 8, 1951), was an American mathematician, known for his work on the calculus of variations.
Life
Bliss grew up in a Chicago family that eventually became affluent; in 1907, his father became president of t ...
(University of Chicago): ''Fundamental existence theorems''.
* 1909 Edward Kasner
Edward Kasner (April 2, 1878 – January 7, 1955) was an American mathematician who was appointed Tutor on Mathematics in the Columbia University Mathematics Department. Kasner was the first Jewish person appointed to a faculty position in ...
(Columbia University): ''Differential-geometric aspects of dynamics''.
* 1913 Leonard E. Dickson (University of Chicago): ''On invariants and the theory of numbers''.
* 1913 William Fogg Osgood
William Fogg Osgood (March 10, 1864 – July 22, 1943) was an American mathematician.
Education and career
William Fogg Osgood was born in Boston on March 10, 1864. In 1886, he graduated from Harvard, where, after studying at the universities ...
(Harvard University): ''Topics in the theory of functions of several complex variables''.
* 1916 Griffith C. Evans (Université Rice): ''Functionals and their applications, selected topics including integral equations''.
* 1916 Oswald Veblen
Oswald Veblen (June 24, 1880 – August 10, 1960) was an American mathematician, geometer and topologist, whose work found application in atomic physics and the theory of relativity. He proved the Jordan curve theorem in 1905; while this was lo ...
(Princeton University): ''Analysis situs''.
* 1920 George David Birkhoff
George David Birkhoff (March21, 1884November12, 1944) was one of the top American mathematicians of his generation. He made valuable contributions to the theory of differential equations, dynamical systems, the four-color problem, the three-body ...
(Harvard University): ''Dynamical systems''.
* 1920 Forest Ray Moulton
Forest Ray Moulton (April 29, 1872 – December 7, 1952) was an American astronomer. He was the brother of Harold G. Moulton, a noted economist.
Biography
He was born in Le Roy, Michigan, and was educated at Albion College. After graduatin ...
(University of Chicago): ''Topics from the theory of functions of infinitely many variables''.
* 1925 Luther P. Eisenhart (Princeton University): ''Non-Riemannian geometry''.
* 1925 Dunham Jackson
Dunham Jackson (July 24, 1888 in Bridgewater, Massachusetts – November 6, 1946) was a mathematician who worked within approximation theory, notably with trigonometrical and orthogonal polynomials. He is known for Jackson's inequality. He w ...
(University of Minnesota): ''The Theory of Approximations''.
* 1927 Eric Temple Bell
Eric Temple Bell (7 February 1883 – 21 December 1960) was a Scottish-born mathematician, educator and science fiction writer who lived in the United States for most of his life. He published non-fiction using his given name and fiction ...
(California Institute of Technology): ''Algebraic arithmetic''.
* 1927 Anna Pell Wheeler (Bryn Mawr College): ''The theory of quadratic forms in infinitely many variables and applications''.
* 1928 Arthur Byron Coble (University of Illinois): ''The determination of the tritangent planes of the space sextic of genus four''.
* 1929 Robert Lee Moore
Robert Lee Moore (November 14, 1882 – October 4, 1974) was an American mathematician who taught for many years at the University of Texas. He is known for his work in general topology, for the Moore method of teaching university mathematics, ...
(University of Texas): ''Foundations of point set theory''.
* 1930 Solomon Lefschetz
Solomon Lefschetz (; 3 September 1884 – 5 October 1972) was a Russian-born American mathematician who did fundamental work on algebraic topology, its applications to algebraic geometry, and the theory of non-linear ordinary differential equatio ...
(Princeton University): ''Topology''.
* 1931 Marston Morse
Harold Calvin Marston Morse (March 24, 1892 – June 22, 1977) was an American mathematician best known for his work on the ''calculus of variations in the large'', a subject where he introduced the technique of differential topology now known a ...
(Harvard University): ''The calculus of variations in the large''.
* 1932 Joseph Ritt
Joseph Fels Ritt (August 23, 1893 – January 5, 1951) was an American mathematician at Columbia University in the early 20th century. He was born and died in New York.
Biography
After beginning his undergraduate studies at City College of Ne ...
(Columbia University): ''Differential equations from the algebraic standpoint''.
* 1934 Raymond Paley
Raymond Edward Alan Christopher Paley (7 January 1907 – 7 April 1933) was an England, English mathematician who made significant contributions to mathematical analysis before dying young in a skiing accident.
Life
Paley was born in Bournemou ...
(Trinity College, Cambridge University), deceased in 1933 and replaced by Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894 – March 18, 1964) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and philosopher. He became a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT). A child prodigy, Wiener late ...
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology): ''Fourier transforms in the complex domain''.
* 1935 Harry Vandiver (University of Texas): ''Fermat's last theorem and related topics in number theory''.
* 1936 Edward W. Chittenden (University of Iowa): ''Topics in general analysis''.
* 1937 John von Neumann
John von Neumann ( ; ; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian and American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist and engineer. Von Neumann had perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time, in ...
(Institute for Advanced Study): ''Continuous geometry''.
* 1939 Abraham Adrian Albert
Abraham Adrian Albert (November 9, 1905 – June 6, 1972) was an American mathematician. In 1939, he received the American Mathematical Society's Cole Prize in Algebra for his work on Riemann matrices. He is best known for his work on the ...
(University of Chicago): ''Structure of algebras''.
* 1939 Marshall Stone
Marshall Harvey Stone (April 8, 1903 – January 9, 1989) was an American mathematician who contributed to real analysis, functional analysis, topology and the study of Boolean algebras.
Biography
Stone was the son of Harlan Fiske Stone, who wa ...
(Harvard University): ''Convex bodies''.
* 1940 Gordon Thomas Whyburn (University of Virginia): ''Analytic topology''.
* 1941 Øystein Ore
Øystein Ore (7 October 1899 – 13 August 1968) was a Norwegian mathematician known for his work in ring theory, Galois connections, graph theory, and the history of mathematics.
Life
Ore graduated from the University of Oslo in 1922, with a ...
(Yale University): ''Mathematical relations and structures''.
* 1942 Raymond Louis Wilder
Raymond Louis Wilder (3 November 1896 in Palmer, Massachusetts – 7 July 1982 in Santa Barbara, California) was an American mathematician, who specialized in topology and gradually acquired philosophical and anthropological interests.
Life
Wild ...
(University of Michigan): ''Topology of manifolds''.
* 1943 Edward James McShane (University of Virginia): ''Existence theorems in the calculus of variations''.
* 1944 Einar Hille
Carl Einar Hille (28 June 1894 – 12 February 1980) was an American mathematics professor and scholar. Hille authored or coauthored twelve mathematical books and a number of mathematical papers.
Early life and education
Hille was born in New Y ...
(Yale University): ''Selected topics in the theory of semi-groups''.
* 1945 Tibor Radó
Tibor Radó ( ; June 2, 1895 – December 29, 1965) was a Hungarian mathematician who moved to the United States after World War I.
Biography
Radó was born in Budapest and between 1913 and 1915 attended the Polytechnic Institute, studying c ...
(Ohio State University): ''Length and area''.
* 1946 Hassler Whitney
Hassler Whitney (March 23, 1907 – May 10, 1989) was an American mathematician. He was one of the founders of singularity theory, and did foundational work in manifolds, embeddings, immersion (mathematics), immersions, characteristic classes and, ...
(Harvard University): ''Topology of smooth manifolds''.
* 1947 Oscar Zariski
Oscar Zariski (April 24, 1899 – July 4, 1986) was an American mathematician. The Russian-born scientist was one of the most influential algebraic geometers of the 20th century.
Education
Zariski was born Oscher (also transliterated as Ascher o ...
(Harvard University): ''Abstract algebraic geometry''.
* 1948 Richard Brauer
Richard Dagobert Brauer (February 10, 1901 – April 17, 1977) was a German and American mathematician. He worked mainly in abstract algebra, but made important contributions to number theory. He was the founder of modular representation t ...
(University of Toronto): ''Representation of groups and rings''.
* 1949 Gustav Hedlund (Yale University): ''Topological Dynamics''.
* 1951 Deane Montgomery
Deane Montgomery (September 2, 1909 – March 15, 1992) was an American mathematician specializing in topology who was one of the contributors to the final resolution of Hilbert's fifth problem in the 1950s. He served as president of the Americ ...
(Institute for Advanced Study): ''Topological transformation groups''.
* 1952 Alfred Tarski
Alfred Tarski (; ; born Alfred Teitelbaum;School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews ''School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews''. January 14, 1901 – October 26, 1983) was a Polish-American logician ...
(University of California, Berkeley): ''Arithmetical classes and types of algebraic systems''.
* 1953 Antoni Zygmund
Antoni Zygmund (December 26, 1900 – May 30, 1992) was a Polish-American mathematician. He worked mostly in the area of mathematical analysis, including harmonic analysis, and he is considered one of the greatest analysts of the 20th century. ...
(University of Chicago): ''On the existence and properties of certain singular integrals''.
* 1955 Nathan Jacobson
Nathan Jacobson (October 5, 1910 – December 5, 1999) was an American mathematician.
Biography
Born Nachman Arbiser in Warsaw, Jacobson emigrated to America with his family in 1918. He graduated from the University of Alabama in 1930 and was awa ...
(Yale University): ''Jordan algebras''.
* 1956 Salomon Bochner
Salomon Bochner (20 August 1899 – 2 May 1982) was a Galizien-born mathematician, known for work in mathematical analysis, probability theory and differential geometry.
Life
He was born into a Jewish family in Podgórze (near Kraków), th ...
(Princeton University): ''Harmonic analysis and probability''.
* 1957 Norman Steenrod
Norman Earl Steenrod (April 22, 1910October 14, 1971) was an American mathematician most widely known for his contributions to the field of algebraic topology.
Life
He was born in Dayton, Ohio, and educated at Miami University and University of ...
(Princeton University): ''Cohomology operations''.
* 1959 Joseph L. Doob (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign): ''The first boundary value problem''.
* 1960 Shiing-Shen Chern
Shiing-Shen Chern (; , ; October 26, 1911 – December 3, 2004) was a Chinese American mathematician and poet. He made fundamental contributions to differential geometry and topology. He has been called the "father of modern differential geome ...
(University of California, Berkeley): ''Geometrical structures on manifolds''.
* 1961 George Mackey
George Whitelaw Mackey (February 1, 1916 – March 15, 2006) was an American mathematician known for his contributions to quantum logic, representation theory, and noncommutative geometry.
Career
Mackey earned his B.A. at Rice University in 1938 ...
(Harvard University): ''Infinite dimensional group representatives''.
* 1963 Saunders Mac Lane
Saunders Mac Lane (August 4, 1909 – April 14, 2005), born Leslie Saunders MacLane, was an American mathematician who co-founded category theory with Samuel Eilenberg.
Early life and education
Mac Lane was born in Norwich, Connecticut, near w ...
(University of Chicago): ''Categorical algebra''.
* 1964 Charles Morrey
Charles Bradfield Morrey Jr. (July 23, 1907 – April 29, 1984) was an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to the calculus of variations and the theory of partial differential equations.
Life
Charles Bradfield Morrey Jr. ...
(University of California, Berkeley): ''Multiple integrals in the calculus of variations''.
* 1965 Alberto Calderón
Alberto Pedro Calderón (September 14, 1920 – April 16, 1998) was an Argentine mathematician. His name is associated with the University of Buenos Aires, but first and foremost with the University of Chicago, where Calderón and his mentor, th ...
(University of Chicago): ''Singular integrals''.
* 1967 Samuel Eilenberg
Samuel Eilenberg (September 30, 1913 – January 30, 1998) was a Polish-American mathematician who co-founded category theory (with Saunders Mac Lane) and homological algebra.
Early life and education
He was born in Warsaw, Kingdom of Poland to ...
(Columbia University): ''Universal algebras and the theory of automata''.
* 1968 Donald Spencer (Stanford University): ''Overdetermined systems of partial differential equations''.
* 1968 John Willard Milnor (Princeton University and University of California, Los Angeles): ''Uses of the fundamental group''.
* 1969 Raoul Bott
Raoul Bott (September 24, 1923 – December 20, 2005) was a Hungarian-American mathematician known for numerous foundational contributions to geometry in its broad sense. He is best known for his Bott periodicity theorem, the Morse–Bott function ...
(Harvard University): ''On the periodicity theorem of the classical groups and its applications''.
* 1969 Harish-Chandra
Harish-Chandra (né Harishchandra) FRS (11 October 1923 – 16 October 1983) was an Indian-American mathematician and physicist who did fundamental work in representation theory, especially harmonic analysis on semisimple Lie groups.
Early ...
(Institute for Advanced Study): ''Harmonic analysis of semisimple Lie groups''.
* 1970 R. H. Bing (University of Wisconsin, Madison): ''Topology of 3-manifolds''.
* 1971 Lipman Bers
Lipman Bers ( Latvian: ''Lipmans Berss''; May 22, 1914 – October 29, 1993) was a Latvian-American mathematician, born in Riga, who created the theory of pseudoanalytic functions and worked on Riemann surfaces and Kleinian groups. He was also k ...
(Columbia University): ''Uniformization, moduli, and Kleinian groups''.
* 1971 Armand Borel
Armand Borel (21 May 1923 – 11 August 2003) was a Swiss mathematician, born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and was a permanent professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States from 1957 to 1993. He worked in alg ...
(Institute for Advanced Study): ''Algebraic groups and arithmetic groups''.
* 1972 Stephen Smale
Stephen Smale (born July 15, 1930) is an American mathematician, known for his research in topology, dynamical systems and mathematical economics. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966 and spent more than three decades on the mathematics faculty ...
(University of California, Berkeley): ''Applications of global analysis to biology, economics, electrical circuits, and celestial mechanics''.
* 1972 John T. Tate (Harvard University): ''The arithmetic of elliptic curves''.
* 1973 Michael Francis Atiyah (Institute for Advanced Study): ''The index of elliptic operators''.
* 1973 Felix Browder
Felix Earl Browder (; July 31, 1927 – December 10, 2016) was an American mathematician known for his work in nonlinear functional analysis. He received the National Medal of Science in 1999 and was President of the American Mathematical Socie ...
(University of Chicago): ''Nonlinear functional analysis and its applications to nonlinear partial differential and integral equations''.
* 1974 Errett Bishop
Errett Albert Bishop (July 14, 1928 – April 14, 1983) was an American mathematician known for his work on analysis. He is best known for developing constructive analysis in his 1967 ''Foundations of Constructive Analysis'', where he proved mos ...
(University of California, San Diego): ''Schizophrenia in contemporary mathematics''.
* 1974 Louis Nirenberg
Louis Nirenberg (February 28, 1925 – January 26, 2020) was a Canadian-American mathematician, considered one of the most outstanding Mathematical analysis, mathematicians of the 20th century.
Nearly all of his work was in the field of par ...
(Courant Institute): ''Selected topics in partial differential equations''.
* 1974 John Griggs Thompson (University of Cambridge): ''Finite simple groups.''
* 1975 Howard Jerome Keisler
Howard Jerome Keisler (born 3 December 1936) is an American mathematician, currently professor emeritus at University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research has included model theory and non-standard analysis.
His Ph.D. advisor was Alfred Tarski a ...
(University of Wisconsin): ''New directions in model theory''.
* 1975 Ellis Kolchin
Ellis Robert Kolchin (April 18, 1916 – October 30, 1991) was an American mathematician at Columbia University. He earned a doctorate in mathematics from Columbia University in 1941 under supervision of Joseph Ritt. Shortly after he served in t ...
(Columbia University): ''Differential algebraic groups''.
* 1975 Elias Stein (Princeton University): ''Singular integrals, old and new''.
* 1976 Isadore M. Singer (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): ''Connections between analysis, geometry and topology''.
* 1976 Jürgen Moser
Jürgen Kurt Moser (July 4, 1928 – December 17, 1999) was a German-American mathematician, honored for work spanning over four decades, including Hamiltonian dynamical systems and partial differential equations.
Life
Moser's mother Ilse Strehl ...
(Courant Institute): ''Recent progress in dynamical systems''.
* 1977 William Browder (Princeton University): ''Differential topology of higher dimensional manifolds''.
* 1977 Herbert Federer
Herbert Federer (July 23, 1920 – April 21, 2010) was an American mathematician. He is one of the creators of geometric measure theory, at the meeting point of differential geometry and mathematical analysis.Parks, H. (2012''Remembering Herbert F ...
(Brown University): ''Geometric measure theory.''
* 1978 Hyman Bass
Hyman Bass (; born October 5, 1932)
Phillip Griffiths
Phillip Augustus Griffiths IV (born October 18, 1938) is an American mathematician, known for his work in the field of geometry, and in particular for the complex manifold approach to algebraic geometry. He is a major developer in particular ...
(Harvard University): ''Complex analysis and algebraic geometry''.
* 1979 George Mostow (Yale University): ''Discrete subgroups of Lie groups''.
* 1980 Wolfgang M. Schmidt (University of Colorado, Boulder): ''Various methods in number theory''.
* 1980 Julia Robinson
Julia Hall Bowman Robinson (December 8, 1919July 30, 1985) was an American mathematician noted for her contributions to the fields of computability theory and computational complexity theory—most notably in decision problems. Her work on Hilber ...
(University of California, Berkeley): ''Between logic and arithmetic''.
* 1981 Mark Kac
Mark Kac ( ; Polish: ''Marek Kac''; August 3, 1914 – October 26, 1984) was a Polish-American mathematician. His main interest was probability theory. His question, " Can one hear the shape of a drum?" set off research into spectral theory, th ...
(Rockefeller University): ''Some mathematical problems suggested by questions in physics''.
* 1981 Serge Lang
Serge Lang (; May 19, 1927 – September 12, 2005) was a French-American mathematician and activist who taught at Yale University for most of his career. He is known for his work in number theory and for his mathematics textbooks, including the i ...
(Yale University): ''Units and class numbers in algebraic geometry and number theory''.
* 1982 Dennis Sullivan
Dennis Parnell Sullivan (born February 12, 1941) is an American mathematician known for his work in algebraic topology, geometric topology, and dynamical systems. He holds the Albert Einstein Chair at the Graduate Center of the City University ...
(CUNY, Graduate School and University Center): ''Geometry, iteration, and group theory''.
* 1982 Morris Hirsch
Morris William Hirsch (born June 28, 1933) is an American mathematician, formerly at the University of California, Berkeley.
A native of Chicago, Illinois, Hirsch attained his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1958, under supervision of ...
(University of California, Berkeley): ''Convergence in ordinary and partial differential equations''.
* 1983 Charles Fefferman
Charles Louis Fefferman (born April 18, 1949) is an American mathematician at Princeton University, where he is currently the Herbert E. Jones, Jr. '43 University Professor of Mathematics. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1978 for his contribu ...
(Princeton University): ''The uncertainty principle''.
* 1983 Bertram Kostant
Bertram Kostant (May 24, 1928 – February 2, 2017) was an American mathematician who worked in representation theory, differential geometry, and mathematical physics.
Early life and education
Kostant grew up in New York City, where he gradua ...
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology): ''On the Coxeter element and the structure of the exceptional Lie groups''.
* 1984 Barry Mazur
Barry Charles Mazur (; born December 19, 1937) is an American mathematician and the Gerhard Gade University Professor at Harvard University. His contributions to mathematics include his contributions to Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in ...
(Harvard University): ''On the arithmetic of curves''.
* 1984 Paul Rabinowitz
Paul H. Rabinowitz (born 1939) is the Edward Burr Van Vleck Professor of Mathematics and a Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He received a Ph.D. from New York University in 1966 under the direction of Jürgen Moser. ...
(University of Wisconsin, Madison): ''Minimax methods in critical point theory and applications to differential equations''.
* 1985 Daniel Gorenstein
Daniel E. Gorenstein (January 1, 1923 – August 26, 1992) was an American mathematician best remembered for his contribution to the classification of finite simple groups.
Gorenstein mastered calculus at age 12 and subsequently matriculated at ...
(Rutgers University): ''The classification of the finite simple groups''.
* 1985 Karen Uhlenbeck
Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck ForMemRS (born August 24, 1942) is an American mathematician and one of the founders of modern geometric analysis. She is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Sid W ...
(University of Chicago): ''Mathematical gauge field theory''.
* 1986 Shing-Tung Yau
Shing-Tung Yau (; ; born April 4, 1949) is a Chinese-American mathematician. He is the director of the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua University and professor emeritus at Harvard University. Until 2022, Yau was the William Caspar ...
(University of California, San Diego): ''Nonlinear analysis''.
* 1987 Peter Lax
Peter David Lax (1 May 1926 – 16 May 2025) was a Hungarian-born American mathematician and Abel Prize laureate working in the areas of pure and applied mathematics.
Lax made important contributions to integrable systems, fluid dynamics an ...
(Courant Institute): ''Uses of the non-Euclidean wave equation''.
* 1987 Edward Witten
Edward Witten (born August 26, 1951) is an American theoretical physics, theoretical physicist known for his contributions to string theory, topological quantum field theory, and various areas of mathematics. He is a professor emeritus in the sc ...
(Princeton University): ''Mathematical applications of quantum field theory''.
* 1988 Victor Guillemin
Victor William Guillemin (born 1937 in Boston) is an American mathematician. He works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the field of symplectic geometry, and he has also made contributions to the fields of microlocal analysis, spec ...
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology): ''Spectral properties of Riemannian manifold
In differential geometry, a Riemannian manifold is a geometric space on which many geometric notions such as distance, angles, length, volume, and curvature are defined. Euclidean space, the N-sphere, n-sphere, hyperbolic space, and smooth surf ...
s''.
* 1989 Nicholas Katz
Nicholas Michael Katz (; born December 7, 1943) is an American mathematician, working in arithmetic geometry, particularly on ''p''-adic methods, monodromy and moduli problems, and number theory. He is currently a professor of Mathematics a ...
(Princeton University): ''Exponential sums and differential equations''.
* 1989 William Thurston
William Paul Thurston (October 30, 1946August 21, 2012) was an American mathematician. He was a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology and was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982 for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds.
Thurst ...
(Princeton University): ''Geometry, groups, and self-similar tilings''.
* 1990 Shlomo Sternberg
Shlomo Zvi Sternberg (January 20, 1936 – August 23, 2024) was an American mathematician known for his work in geometry, particularly symplectic geometry and Lie theory. He also wrote some well-known textbooks.
Education and career
Sternber ...
(Harvard University): ''Some thoughts on the interaction between group theory and physics''.
* 1991 Robert MacPherson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): ''Intersection homology and perverse sheaves''.
* 1992 Robert Langlands
Robert Phelan Langlands, (; born October 6, 1936) is a Canadian mathematician. He is best known as the founder of the Langlands program, a vast web of conjectures and results connecting representation theory and automorphic forms to the study o ...
(Institute for Advanced Study): ''Automorphic forms and Hasse-Wiel zeta-functions and Finite models for percolation''.
* 1993 Luis Caffarelli
Luis Ángel Caffarelli (; born December 8, 1948) is an Argentine-American mathematician. He studies partial differential equations and their applications. Caffarelli is a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, and the win ...
(Institute for Advanced Study): ''Nonlinear differential equations and Lagrangian coordinates''.
* 1993 Sergiu Klainerman
Sergiu Klainerman (born May 13, 1950) is a mathematician known for his contributions to the study of hyperbolic differential equations and general relativity. He is currently the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University, ...
(Princeton University): ''On the regularity properties of gauge theories in Minkowski space-time''.
* 1994 Jean Bourgain
Jean Louis, baron Bourgain (; – ) was a Belgian mathematician. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1994 in recognition of his work on several core topics of mathematical analysis such as the geometry of Banach spaces, harmonic analysis, ergodi ...
(IHES and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign): ''Harmonic analysis and nonlinear evolution equations''.
* 1995 Clifford Taubes
Clifford Henry Taubes (born February 21, 1954) is the William Petschek Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University and works in gauge field theory, differential geometry, and low-dimensional topology. His brother is the journalist Gary Taub ...
(Harvard University): ''Mysteries in three and four dimensions''.
* 1996 Andrew Wiles
Sir Andrew John Wiles (born 11 April 1953) is an English mathematician and a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in number theory. He is best known for Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, proving Ferma ...
(Princeton University): ''Modular forms, elliptic curves and Galois representations''.
* 1997 Daniel Stroock (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): ''Analysis on spaces of paths''.
* 1998 Gian-Carlo Rota
Gian-Carlo Rota (April 27, 1932 – April 18, 1999) was an Italian-American mathematician and philosopher. He spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked in combinatorics, functional analysis, proba ...
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology): ''Introduction to geometric probability; Invariant theory old and new; and Combinatorial snapshots''.
* 1999 Helmut Hofer (Courant Institute, New York University): ''Symplectic geometry from a dynamical systems point of view''.
* 2000 Curtis McMullen
Curtis Tracy McMullen (born May 21, 1958) is an American mathematician who is the Cabot Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1998 for his work in complex dynamics, hyperbolic geometry and Teichmülle ...
(Harvard University): ''Riemann surface
In mathematics, particularly in complex analysis, a Riemann surface is a connected one-dimensional complex manifold. These surfaces were first studied by and are named after Bernhard Riemann. Riemann surfaces can be thought of as deformed vers ...
s in dynamics, topology, and arithmetic''.
* 2001 János Kollár
János Kollár (born 7 June 1956) is a Hungarian mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry.
Professional career
Kollár began his studies at the Eötvös University in Budapest and later received his PhD at Brandeis University in 1984 ...
(Princeton University): ''Large rationally connected varieties''.
* 2002 Lawrence C. Evans (University of California, Berkeley): ''Entropy methods for partial differential equations''.
* 2003 Peter Sarnak
Peter Clive Sarnak (born 18 December 1953) is a South African and American mathematician. Sarnak has been a member of the permanent faculty of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study since 2007. He is also Eugene Higgins ...
(Courant Institute and Princeton University): ''Spectra of hyperbolic surfaces and applications''.
* 2004 Sun-Yung Alice Chang
Sun-Yung Alice Chang (, , ; born 1948) is a Taiwanese-American mathematician specializing in aspects of mathematical analysis ranging from harmonic analysis and partial differential equations to differential geometry. She is the Eugene Higgins P ...
(Princeton University): ''Conformal invariants and partial differential equations''.
* 2005 Robert Lazarsfeld
Robert Kendall Lazarsfeld (born April 15, 1953) is an American mathematician who specializes in algebraic geometry. He is currently a distinguished professor of mathematics at Stony Brook University. He was previously the Raymond L. Wilder Colle ...
(University of Michigan): ''How polynomials vanish: Singularities, integrals, and ideals''.
* 2006 Hendrik Lenstra
Hendrik Willem Lenstra Jr. (born 16 April 1949, Zaandam) is a Dutch mathematician.
Biography
Lenstra received his doctorate from the University of Amsterdam in 1977 and became a professor there in 1978. In 1987, he was appointed to the faculty o ...
(Universiteit Leiden): ''Entangled radicals''.
* 2007 Andrei Okounkov
Andrei Yuryevich Okounkov (, ''Andrej Okun'kov'', born July 26, 1969) is a Russian mathematician who works on representation theory and its applications to algebraic geometry, mathematical physics, probability theory and special functions. He is ...
(Princeton University): ''Limit shapes, real and imagined''.
* 2008 Wendelin Werner
Wendelin Werner (born 23 September 1968) is a German-born French mathematician working on random processes such as self-avoiding random walks, Brownian motion, Schramm–Loewner evolution, and related theories in probability theory and mathematic ...
(University of Paris-Sud): ''Random conformally invariant pictures''.
* 2009 Grigori Alexandrowitsch Margulis (Yale University): ''Homogenous dynamics and number theory''.
* 2010 Richard P. Stanley (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): ''Permutations: 1) Increasing and decreasing subsequences; 2) Alternating permutations; 3) Reduced decompositions''.
* 2011 Alexander Lubotzky
Alexander Lubotzky (; born 28 June 1956) is an Israeli mathematician and former politician who is currently a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science and an adjunct professor at Yale University. He served as a member of the Knesset for ...
(The Hebrew University of Jerusalem): ''Expander graphs in pure and applied mathematics''.
* 2012 Edward Frenkel
Edward Vladimirovich Frenkel (; born May 2, 1968) is a Russian-American mathematician working in representation theory, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.
E ...
(University of California, Berkeley): ''Langlands program, trace formulas, and their geometrization''.
* 2013 Alice Guionnet (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon): ''Free probability and random matrices''.
* 2014 Dusa McDuff
Dusa McDuff FRS CorrFRSE (born 18 October 1945) is an English mathematician who works on symplectic geometry. She was the first recipient of the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics, was a Noether Lecturer, and is a Fellow of the Royal So ...
(Columbia University): ''Symplectic topology today''.
* 2015 Michael J. Hopkins (Harvard University): ''1) Algebraic topology: New and old directions; 2) The Kervaire invariant problem; 3) Chern-Weil theory and abstract homotopy theory''.
* 2016 Timothy A. Gowers (University of Cambridge): ''Generalizations of Fourier analysis, and how to apply them''.
* 2017 Carlos Kenig (University of Chicago): ''The focusing energy critical wave equation: the radical case in 3 space dimensions''.
* 2018 Avi Wigderson
Avi Wigderson (; born 9 September 1956) is an Israeli computer scientist and mathematician. He is the Herbert H. Maass Professor in the school of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America ...
(Institute for Advanced Study): ''1) Alternate Minimization and Scaling algorithms: theory, applications and connections across mathematics and computer science; 2) Proving algebraic identities; 3) Proving analytic inequalities''.
* 2019 Benedict Gross (Harvard University): ''Complex multiplication: past, present, future''.
* 2020 Ingrid Daubechies
Baroness Ingrid Daubechies ( ; ; born 17 August 1954) is a Belgian-American physicist and mathematician. She is best known for her work with wavelets in image compression.
Daubechies is recognized for her study of the mathematical methods that ...
(Duke University): ''Mathematical Frameworks for Signal and Image Analysis.''
* 2021 not awarded
* 2022 Karen E. Smith (University of Michigan): ''Understanding and measuring singularities in algebraic geometry.''
* 2023 Camillo De Lellis
Camillo De Lellis (born 11 June 1976) is an Italian mathematician who is active in the fields of calculus of variations, hyperbolic systems of conservation laws, geometric measure theory and fluid dynamics. He is a permanent faculty member in ...
(Princeton University): ''Flows of nonsmooth vector fields.''[{{Cite web , last= , first= , title=2023 Joint Mathematics Meetings , url=https://www.jointmathematicsmeetings.org/meetings/national/jmm2023/2270_invspeakers , access-date=2023-01-22 , website= , language=en]
See also
* Josiah Willard Gibbs Lectureship
The Josiah Willard Gibbs Lectureship (also called the Gibbs Lecture) of the American Mathematical Society is an annually awarded mathematical prize, named in honor of Josiah Willard Gibbs. The prize is intended not only for mathematicians, but also ...
External links
Official website
References
Lecture series
American Mathematical Society
1896 establishments in the United States
Books of lectures
Recurring events established in 1896
Mathematics education in the United States
Mathematical events