The Beckenbach Book Prize, formerly known as the Mathematical Association of America Book Prize, is awarded to authors of distinguished, innovative books that have been published by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). [1] The prize, named in honor of Edwin F. Beckenbach, was established in 1983 and first awarded in 1985. The award is $2500 for the honored author and is awarded on an irregular basis. In January 1985 Charles Robert Hadlock was awarded the MAA Book Prize, [2] which later in 1985 became the Beckenbach Book Prize.
The recipients of the Beckenbach Book Prize and their books are: [1] [3]
The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) is a professional society that focuses on mathematics accessible at the undergraduate level. Members include university, college, and high school teachers; graduate and undergraduate students; pure and applied mathematicians; computer scientists; statisticians; and many others in academia, government, business, and industry.
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, advocacy and other programs.
Ronald Lewis Graham was an American mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years". He was president of both the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America, and his honors included the Leroy P. Steele Prize for lifetime achievement and election to the National Academy of Sciences.
Paul Richard Halmos was a Hungarian-born American mathematician and statistician who made fundamental advances in the areas of mathematical logic, probability theory, statistics, operator theory, ergodic theory, and functional analysis. He was also recognized as a great mathematical expositor. He has been described as one of The Martians.
William Gilbert Strang is an American mathematician known for his contributions to finite element theory, the calculus of variations, wavelet analysis and linear algebra. He has made many contributions to mathematics education, including publishing mathematics textbooks. Strang was the MathWorks Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He taught Linear Algebra, Computational Science, and Engineering, Learning from Data, and his lectures are freely available through MIT OpenCourseWare.
Judith Victor Grabiner is an American mathematician and historian of mathematics, who is Flora Sanborn Pitzer Professor Emerita of Mathematics at Pitzer College, one of the Claremont Colleges. Her main interest is in mathematics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
William Wade Dunham is an American writer who was originally trained in topology but became interested in the history of mathematics and specializes in Leonhard Euler. He has received several awards for writing and teaching on this subject.
Steven George Krantz is an American scholar, mathematician, and writer. He has authored more than 350 research papers and published more than 150 books. Additionally, Krantz has edited journals such as the Notices of the American Mathematical Society and The Journal of Geometric Analysis.
The Euler Book Prize is an award named after Swiss mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) and given annually at the Joint Mathematics Meetings by the Mathematical Association of America to an outstanding book in mathematics that is likely to improve the public view of the field.
Jennifer J. Quinn is an American mathematician specializing in combinatorics, and professor of mathematics at the University of Washington Tacoma. She sits on the board of governors of the Mathematical Association of America, and is serving as its president for the years 2021 and 2022. From 2004 to 2008 she was co-editor of Math Horizons.
James Stuart Tanton is a mathematician and math educator. He is a winner of the Kidder Faculty Prize for his teaching at The St. Mark’s Math Institute, scholar at the Mathematical Association of America, author of over ten books on mathematics, curriculum, and education, and creator of videos on mathematics on YouTube. As of February 2020 his approximately 190 videos had earned over 800,000 views.
Francis Edward Su is an American mathematician. He joined the Harvey Mudd College faculty in 1996, and is currently Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics. Su served as president of the Mathematical Association of America from 2015–2017 and is serving as a Vice President of the American Mathematical Society from 2020-2023. Su has received multiple awards from the MAA, including the Henry L. Alder Award and the Haimo Award, both for distinguished teaching. He was also a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar during the 2019-2020 term.
Fernando Quadros Gouvêa is a Brazilian number theorist and historian of mathematics who won the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) in 1995 for his exposition of Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. He also won the Beckenbach Book Prize of the MAA in 2007 for his book with William P. Berlinghoff, Math through the Ages: A Gentle History for Teachers and Others . He is the Carter Professor of Mathematics at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
Sherman Kopald Stein is an American mathematician and an author of mathematics textbooks. He is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis. His writings have won the Lester R. Ford Award and the Beckenbach Book Prize.
Proofs That Really Count: the Art of Combinatorial Proof is an undergraduate-level mathematics book on combinatorial proofs of mathematical identies. That is, it concerns equations between two integer-valued formulas, shown to be equal either by showing that both sides of the equation count the same type of mathematical objects, or by finding a one-to-one correspondence between the different types of object that they count. It was written by Arthur T. Benjamin and Jennifer Quinn, and published in 2003 by the Mathematical Association of America as volume 27 of their Dolciani Mathematical Expositions series. It won the Beckenbach Book Prize of the Mathematical Association of America.
Algebra and Tiling: Homomorphisms in the Service of Geometry is a mathematics textbook on the use of group theory to answer questions about tessellations and higher dimensional honeycombs, partitions of the Euclidean plane or higher-dimensional spaces into congruent tiles. It was written by Sherman K. Stein and Sándor Szabó, and published by the Mathematical Association of America as volume 25 of their Carus Mathematical Monographs series in 1994. It won the 1998 Beckenbach Book Prize, and was reprinted in paperback in 2008.
Timothy P. Chartier is an American mathematician known for his expertise in sports analytics and bracketology, for his popular mathematics books, and for the "mime-matics" shows combining mime and mathematics that he and his wife Tanya have staged.
Daniel "Dan" Simon Kalman is an American mathematician and winner of nine awards for expository writing in mathematics.
The Anneli Lax New Mathematical Library is an expository monograph series published by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). The books in the series are intended for a broad audience, including undergraduates, advanced high school students, the general public, and teachers. The American Mathematical Society (AMS) makes available the AMS/MAA Press Archive eBook Collection featuring several MAA book series, including the Anneli Lax New Mathematical Library.
Charles Robert Hadlock is an American applied mathematician, professor emeritus of mathematical sciences, and consultant in risk analysis. In 1985 he was awarded the inaugural Beckenbach Book Prize for his 1975 book Field theory and its classical problems. In July 2019 he was a George Póya Lecturer.
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