Awards & Winners

Chauvenet Prize

Chauvenet Prize

The Chauvenet Prize is the highest award for mathematical expository writing. It consists of a prize of $1,000 and a certificate, and is awarded yearly by the Mathematical Association of America in recognition of an outstanding expository article on a mathematical topic. The prize is named in honor of William Chauvenet and was established through a gift from J. L. Coolidge in 1925. Winners to date have been the following: 1925 G. A. Bliss 1929 T. H. Hildebrandt 1932 G. H. Hardy 1935 Dunham Jackson 1938 G. T. Whyburn 1941 Saunders MacLane 1944 R. H. Cameron 1947 Paul Halmos 1950 Mark Kac 1953 E. J. McShane 1956 Richard H. Bruck 1960 Cornelius Lanczos 1963 Philip J. Davis 1964 Leon Henkin 1965 Jack K. Hale & Joseph P. LaSalle 1967 Guido Weiss 1968 Mark Kac 1970 Shiing Shen Chern 1971 Norman Levinson 1972 Jean Francois Treves 1973 C. D. Olds 1974 Peter D. Lax 1975 Martin Davis and Reuben Hersh 1976 Lawrence Zalcman 1977 W. Gilbert Strang 1978 Shreeram S. Abhyankar 1979 Neil J. A. Sloane 1980 Heinz Bauer 1981 Kenneth I. Gross 1982 No award given. 1983 No award given. 1984 R. Arthur Knoebel 1985 Carl Pomerance 1986 George Miel 1987 James H. Wilkinson 1988 Steve Smale 1989 Jacob Korevaar
Date Established : 1925

Check all the winners of Chauvenet Prize presented under Chauvenet Prize since 1925 .


Robert Ghrist

(For his work, Barcodes: The Persistent Topology of Data.)

Dennis DeTurck, Herman Gluck, Daniel Pomerleano, David Shea Vela-Vick

(For their work, The Four Vertex Theorem and Its Converse.)

Bjorn Poonen

(For his article Undecidability in number theory.)

Brian J. McCartin

(For his work, e: The Master of All.)

Harold P. Boas

(For an outstanding article on a mathematical topic.)

Andrew Granville

(For his paper It is easy to determine whether a given integer is prime.)

Andrew J. Simoson

(For his writing The Gravity of Hades.)

Florian Pfender, Günter M. Ziegler

(For their paper on Kissing Numbers, Sphere Packings, and Some Unexpected Proofs.)

John Stillwell

(For his article \u201CThe Story of the 120-Cell.)

Edward Burger

(For his writing Diophantine Olympics and World Champions: Polynomials and Primes Down Under.)

Thomas Callister Hales

(For his article, Cannonballs and Honeycombs.)

Ellen Gethner, Stan Wagon, Brian Wick

(For mathematical exposition in 2002 for their 1998 paper,A Stroll through the Gaussian Primes.)

Carolyn S. Gordon, David Webb

Honored for : You Can't Hear The Shape of a Drum
(For their 1996 American Scientist paper, You can't hear the shape of a drum.)

Don Zagier

(For his work, Newman's Short Proof of the Prime Number Theorem.)

Michael Rosen

(For his essay Niels Hendrik Abel and equations of the fifth degree.)

Alan Edelman, Eric Kostlan

(For their work, How Many Zeros of a Random Polynomial are Real?)

Tom Hawkins

(For his work, The Birth of Lie's Theory of Groups .)

Joan Birman

(For her work, New Points of View in Knot Theory.)

D. Saari

(For his work, A Visit to the Newtonian N-body Problem via Elementary Complex Variables.)

Barry Mazur

(For his work, Number Theory as Gadfly.)

David Harold Bailey, Jonathan Borwein, Peter Borwein

(For their writing Ramanujan, Modular Equations, and Approximations to Pi, or, How to Compute One Billion Digits of Pi.)

Steven G. Krantz

(For his writing What is Several Complex Variables?.)

W. B. Raymond Lickoris, Kenneth C. Millett

(For their writing The New Polynomial Invariants of Knots and Links.)

David Allen Hoffman

(For his writing The Computer-Aided Discovery of New Embedded Minimal Surfaces.)

Nicholas Jacob Korevaar

(For an essay on Louis de Branges de Bourcia's proof of the Bieberbach conjecture.)

Stephen Smale

(For his work entitled, On the Efficiency of Algorithms in Analysis.)

James H. Wilkinson

(For his article, The Perfidious Polynomial.)

George Miel

(For his article entiitled, Of Calculations Past and Present: The Archimedean Algorithm.)

Carl Pomerance

(For his work, Recent Developments in Primality Testing.)

R. Arthur Knoebel

(For his work, Exponentials Reiterated.)

Kenneth I. Gross

(For his work, On the Evolution of Noncommutative Harmonic Analysis.)

Heinz Bauer

(For his paper entitled, Approximation and Abstract Boundaries.)

Neil Sloane

(For his work, Error-Correcting Codes and Invariant Theory: New Applications of a Nineteenth-Century Technique.)

Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar

(For his work entitled, Historical Ramblings in Algebraic Geometry and Related Algebra.)

Gilbert Strang

(For his work, Piecewise Polynomials and the Finite Element Method.)

Lawrence Zalcman

(For his work, Real Proofs of Complex Theorems (and vice versa).)

Martin Davis, Reuben Hersh

(For their work, Hilbert's 10th Problem.)

Peter Lax

(For his paper, The Formation and Decay of Shock Waves.)

C. D. Olds

(For his writing The Simple Continued Fraction Expansion of e.)

Jean Francois Treves

(For his writing On Local Solvability of Linear Partial Differential Equations.)

Norman Levinson

(For his paper A Motivated Account of an Elementary Proof of the Prime Number Theorem.)

Shiing-Shen Chern

(For his writing Curves and Surfaces in Euclidean Space.)

Mark Kac

(For his work, Can One Hear the Shape of a Drum?)

Guido Weiss

(For his book Harmonic Analysis.)

Joseph P. LaSalle, Jack K. Hale

(For their work, Differential Equations: Linearity vs. Nonlinearity.)

Leon Henkin

(For his work, Are Mathematics and Logic Identical?)

Philip J. Davis

(For an article Leonhard Euler's Integral: An Historical Profile of the Gamma Function.)

Cornelius Lanczos

(For his writing Linear Systems in Self-Adjoint Form.)

R. H. Bruck

(For his article Recent Advances in the Foundations of Euclidean Plane Geometry.)

E. J. McShane

(For his writing Partial Orderings and Moore-Smith Limits.)

Mark Kac

(For his writing Random Walk and the Theory of Brownian Motion.)

Paul Halmos

(For his work, The Foundations of Probability.)

R.H. Cameron

(For his work, Some Introductory Exercises in the Manipulation of Fourier Transforms.)

Saunders Mac Lane

(For his writing Modular Fields and Some Recent Advances in Algebra.)

Gordon Thomas Whyburn

(For his work, On the Structure of Continua.)

Dunham Jackson

('For his works, The Convergence of Fourier Series, Series of Orthogonal Polynomials and Orthogonal Trigonometric Sums.)

G. H. Hardy

(For his work, An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers.)

T. H. Hildebrandt

(For his 1926 expository article The Borel theorem and its generalizations.)

Gilbert Ames Bliss

(For his article Algebraic functions and their divisors, which culminated in his 1933 book Algebraic functions.)