Levi L. Conant Prize

Levi L. Conant Prize

This prize was established in 2000 in honor of Levi L. Conant to recognize the best expository paper published in either the Notices of the AMS or the Bulletin of the AMS in the preceding five years.  The US$1,000 prize is awarded annually.

Levi L. Conant (1857-1916) was a mathematician and educator who spent most of his career as a faculty member at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He was head of the mathematics department from 1908 until his death and served as interim president of WPI from 1911 to 1913. Conant was noted as an outstanding teacher and an active scholar. He published a number of articles in scientific journals and wrote four textbooks. His will provided for funds to be donated to the AMS upon his wife’s death, which occurred sixty years after his own demise.

(Winners of the prize are invited to present a public lecture at Worcester Polytechnic Institute as part of their  Levi L. Conant Lecture Series, which was established in 2006.)

Next award:  January 2010.  Call for nominations.

Ninth award, 2009. To John Morgan for his article, "Recent Progress on the Poincaré Conjecture and the Classification of 3-Manifolds," Bulletin of the AMS 42 (2005), 57-78.

Eighth award, 2008:   To J. Brian Conrey for his article "The Riemann Hypothesis," Notices of the AMS 50 (2003) no. 3, 341-353; and to Shlomo Hoory, Nathan Linial, and Avi Wigderson for their article "Expander graphs and their applications", Bulletin of the AMS 43 (2006), no. 4, 439-561.

Seventh award, 2007 :  To Jeffrey Weeks for his article "The Poincare Dodecahedral Space and the Mystery of the Missing Fluctuations, " Notices of the AMS 51 (2004) no. 6, 610-619.

Sixth award, 2006 :  To Ronald Solomon for his article “A Brief History of the Classification of the Finite Simple Groups ”, Bulletin of the AMS 38 (2001), no. 3, 315–352.

Fifth award, 2005 :  To Allen Knutson and Terence Tao for their stimulating article "Honeycombs and Sums of Hermitian Matrices, " Notices of the AMS  48, no. 2 (2001), 175-186.

Fourth award, 2004 :  To Noam D. Elkies for his enlightening two-part article “Lattices, Linear Codes, and Invariants”, Notices of the AMS 47, nos. 10–11 (2000): Part I, 1238–45; Part II, 1382–91.

Third award, 2003 : To Nicholas Katz and Peter Sarnak for their expository paper “Zeroes of zeta functions and symmetry ”, Bulletin of the AMS 36 1–26 (1999).

Second award, 2002 : To Elliott H. Lieb and Jakob Yngvason for their article, "A Guide to Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, " Notices of the AMS 45, no. 5 (1998), 571-581.

First award, 2001 : To Carl Pomerance for his paper,"A Tale of Two Sieves, " Notices of the AMS 43, no. 12 (1996), 1473-1485.