News Release

Steele prize for mathematical exposition goes to Springer author

David Mumford honored for outstanding work in algebraic geometry

Grant and Award Announcement

Springer

David Mumford (69) of Brown University has received the 2007 American Mathematical Society (AMS) Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition. Presented annually by the AMS, the Steele Prize is one of the highest distinctions in mathematics. The prize was awarded on Saturday, January 6, 2007, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans, LA, USA. The prize is accompanied by US$ 5,000.

The prize citation honors Mumford for "his beautiful expository accounts of a host of aspects of algebraic geometry." Among the works mentioned in the prize citation is The Red Book of Varieties and Schemes published by Springer. In the words of the AMS Council, this is one of the few books that attempt to convey in pictures some of the highly abstract notions that arise in the field of algebraic geometry.

The prize citation states that, in Mumford's Red Book and in Abelian Varieties (Oxford University Press) "the classical theory is beautifully intertwined with the modern theory, in a way which sharply illuminates both." The citation also recognizes other influential Springer works authored or co-authored by Mumford: Geometric Invariant Theory and Complex Projective Varieties. The prize citation concludes: "All of these books are, and will remain for the foreseeable future, classics to which the reader returns over and over."

David Mumford received his PhD from Harvard University in 1961. He was awarded the Fields Medal, the world's highest honor in mathematics, in 1974. In the mid-1980s, after more than two decades of outstanding work in algebraic geometry, he switched research areas and nowadays works on constructing mathematical models for the understanding of visual perception.

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