Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics | |
---|---|
Awarded for | outstanding contribution to mathematics research by a woman in the previous six years |
Presented by | American Mathematical Society |
Reward(s) | $5,000 |
First awarded | 1991 |
Currently held by | Ana Caraiani (2025) |
Website | www |
The Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics, also called the Satter Prize, is one of twenty-one prizes given out by the American Mathematical Society (AMS). [1] It is presented biennially in recognition of an outstanding contribution to mathematics research by a woman in the previous six years. [2] The award was funded in 1990 using a donation from Joan Birman, in memory of her sister, Ruth Lyttle Satter, [3] who worked primarily in biological sciences, and was a proponent for equal opportunities for women in science. [4] First awarded in 1991, the award is intended to "honor [Satter's] commitment to research and to encourage women in science". [5] The winner is selected by the council of the AMS, based on the recommendation of a selection committee. [5] The prize is awarded at the Joint Mathematics Meetings during odd numbered years, and has always carried a modest cash reward. Since 2003, the prize has been $5,000, [5] [6] while from 1997 to 2001, the prize came with $1,200, [7] [8] and prior to that with $4,000. [9] If a joint award is made, the prize money is split between the recipients. [7]
Dusa McDuff was the first recipient of the award, for her work on symplectic geometry. [10] A joint award was made for the only time in 2001, when Karen E. Smith and Sijue Wu shared the award. [7] The 2013 prize winner was Maryam Mirzakhani, who, the following year, became the first woman to be awarded the Fields Medal, which is considered to be the highest honor a mathematician can receive. [11] [12] She won both awards for her work on "the geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces". [13] The most recent winner is Ana Caraiani, who was awarded the prize in 2025 "for contributions to arithmetic geometry and number theory: in particular, the Langlands program.". [14]
Year | Image | Recipient | Rationale |
---|---|---|---|
1991 | Dusa McDuff | "for her outstanding work during the past five years on symplectic geometry" | |
1993 | Lai-Sang Young | "for her leading role in the investigation of the statistical (or ergodic) properties of dynamical systems" | |
1995 | Sun-Yung Alice Chang | "for her deep contributions to the study of partial differential equations on Riemannian manifolds and in particular for her work on extremal problems in spectral geometry and the compactness of isospectral metrics within a fixed conformal class on a compact 3-manifold" | |
1997 | Ingrid Daubechies | "for her deep and beautiful analysis of wavelets and their applications" | |
1999 | Bernadette Perrin-Riou | "for her number theoretical research on p-adic L-functions and Iwasawa theory" | |
2001 | Karen E. Smith | "for her outstanding work in commutative algebra" | |
Sijue Wu | "for her work on a long-standing problem in the water wave equation" | ||
2003 | Abigail Thompson | "for her outstanding work in 3-dimensional topology" | |
2005 | Svetlana Jitomirskaya | "for her pioneering work on non-perturbative quasiperiodic localization, in particular for results in her papers (1) Metal–insulator transition for the almost Mathieu operator, Ann. of Math. (2) 150 (1999), no. 3, 1159–1175, and (2) with J. Bourgain, Absolutely continuous spectrum for 1D quasiperiodic operators, Invent. Math. 148 (2002), no. 3, 453–463" | |
2007 | Claire Voisin | "for her deep contributions to algebraic geometry, and in particular for her recent solutions to two long-standing open problems: the Kodaira problem (On the homotopy types of compact Kähler and complex projective manifolds, Inventiones Mathematicae, 157 (2004), no. 2, 329–343) and Green's conjecture (Green's canonical syzygy conjecture for generic curves of odd genus, Compositio Mathematica, 141 (2005), no. 5, 1163–1190; and Green's generic syzygy conjecture for curves of even genus lying on a K3 surface, Journal of the European Mathematical Society, 4 (2002), no. 4, 363–404)" | |
2009 | Laure Saint-Raymond | "for her fundamental work on the hydrodynamic limits of the Boltzmann equation in the kinetic theory of gases" | |
2011 | Amie Wilkinson | "for her remarkable contributions to the field of ergodic theory of partially hyperbolic dynamical systems" | |
2013 | Maryam Mirzakhani | "for her deep contributions to the theory of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces" | |
2015 | Hee Oh | "for her fundamental contributions to the fields of dynamics on homogeneous spaces, discrete subgroups of Lie groups, and applications to number theory" | |
2017 | Laura DeMarco | "for her fundamental contributions to complex dynamics, potential theory, and the emerging field of arithmetic dynamics" | |
2019 | Maryna Viazovska | "for her groundbreaking work in discrete geometry and her spectacular solution to the sphere-packing problem in dimension eight." | |
2021 | Kaisa Matomäki | "for her work (much of it joint with Maksym Radziwiłł) opening up the field of multiplicative functions in short intervals in a completely unexpected and very fruitful way..." | |
2023 | Panagiota Daskalopoulos | "for groundbreaking work in the study of ancient solutions to geometric evolution equations" | |
Nataša Šešum | |||
2025 | Ana Caraiani | "for contributions to arithmetic geometry and number theory: in particular, the Langlands program." |
The Fields Medal is a prize awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians under 40 years of age at the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), a meeting that takes place every four years. The name of the award honours the Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields.
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.
Baroness Ingrid Daubechies is a Belgian-American physicist and mathematician. She is best known for her work with wavelets in image compression.
Dusa McDuff FRS CorrFRSE 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 Society. She is currently the Helen Lyttle Kimmel '42 Professor of Mathematics at Barnard College.
Claire Voisin is a French mathematician known for her work in algebraic geometry. She is a member of the French Academy of Sciences and holds the chair of algebraic geometry at the Collège de France.
Maryam Mirzakhani was an Iranian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. Her research topics included Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, and symplectic geometry. On 13 August 2014, Mirzakhani was honored with the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, becoming the first woman to win the prize, as well as the first Iranian. The award committee cited her work in "the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces".
Joan Sylvia Lyttle Birman is an American mathematician, specializing in low-dimensional topology. She has made contributions to the study of knots, 3-manifolds, mapping class groups of surfaces, geometric group theory, contact structures and dynamical systems. Birman is research professor emerita at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she has been since 1973.
The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) is a professional society whose mission is to encourage women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity for and the equal treatment of women and girls in the mathematical sciences. The AWM was founded in 1971 and incorporated in the state of Massachusetts. AWM has approximately 5200 members, including over 250 institutional members, such as colleges, universities, institutes, and mathematical societies. It offers numerous programs and workshops to mentor women and girls in the mathematical sciences. Much of AWM's work is supported through federal grants.
The Maryam Mirzakhani Prize in Mathematics is awarded by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences "for excellence of research in the mathematical sciences published within the past ten years." Named after the Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, the prize has been awarded every four years since 1988.
Lawrence David Guth is a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Hee Oh is a Korean American mathematician and the Abraham Robinson Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. She made contributions to dynamical systems, discrete subgroups of Lie groups, and their connections to geometry and number theory.
This is a timeline of women in mathematics.
Karen Ellen Smith is an American mathematician, specializing in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. She completed her bachelor's degree in mathematics at Princeton University before earning her PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1993. Currently she is the Keeler Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. In addition to being a researcher in algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, Smith with others wrote the textbook An Invitation to Algebraic Geometry.
Laura Grace DeMarco is a professor of mathematics at Harvard University, whose research concerns dynamical systems and complex analysis.
Ana Caraiani is a Romanian-American mathematician, who is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Hausdorff Chair at the University of Bonn. Her research interests include algebraic number theory and the Langlands program.
Svetlana Yakovlevna Jitomirskaya is a mathematician working on dynamical systems and mathematical physics. She is a distinguished professor of mathematics at Georgia Tech and UC Irvine. She is best known for solving the ten martini problem along with mathematician Artur Avila.
Panagiota Daskalopoulos is a professor of mathematics at Columbia University whose research involves partial differential equations and differential geometry. At Columbia, she also serves as director of undergraduate studies for mathematics.
Kaisa Sofia Matomäki is a Finnish mathematician specializing in number theory. Since September 2015, she has been working as an Academic Research Fellow in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Turku, Turku, Finland. Her research includes results on the distribution of multiplicative functions over short intervals of numbers; for instance, she showed that the values of the Möbius function are evenly divided between +1 and −1 over short intervals. These results, in turn, were among the tools used by Terence Tao to prove the Erdős discrepancy problem.
Nina Holden is a Norwegian mathematician interested in probability theory and stochastic processes, including graphons, random planar maps, the Schramm–Loewner evolution, and their applications to quantum gravity. She was a Junior Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Studies at ETH Zurich, and is currently an associate professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University.
Jinyoung Park is a South Korean mathematician at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University working in combinatorics and graph theory.