The 2023 LMS Prize winners were announced at the Society Meeting on Friday 30 June 2023. The LMS extends its congratulations to this year’s prize winners for their continued contributions to mathematics.
Professor Dame Frances Kirwan FRS, of the University of Oxford, is awarded the Pólya Prize for her many outstanding and influential results in geometry and for her career-long service to the mathematical community.
Professor Agata Smoktunowicz, of the University of Edinburgh, is awarded a Senior Whitehead Prize for her agenda-setting work in ring theory, which single-handedly re-awakened interest in classical problems that had been moribund for many years. Other themes in her research have provided fundamental underpinning to noncommutative (projective) algebraic geometry.
Dr Eugénie Hunsicker, of the Access Group, is awarded the Senior Anne Bennett Prize for her outstanding work to improve equality and diversity in the mathematical community and for the depth of her mathematical achievements across an impressive range of areas, from L2 Hodge theory to data science.
Professor Jens Eggers, of the University of Bristol, is awarded a Naylor Prize for his profound contributions to the theoretical understanding of singularities of nonlinear partial differential equations, particularly his construction of explicit solutions of equations that shed deep insight into experiments.
Dr Jian Ding, of Peking University, and Dr Ewain Gwynne, of the University of Chicago, are awarded a Berwick Prize for their paper Uniqueness of the critical and supercritical Liouville quantum gravity metrics, published in the Proceedings of the LMS. This paper completes the mathematical construction and characterisation of the physically natural random metrics in the plane defined via exponentials of the Gaussian Free Field in the delicate cases where it turns out that a dense set of singular points are at infinite distance from all others.
Dr David Bate, of the University of Warwick, is awarded a Whitehead Prize for his deep and fundamental contributions to the development of Geometric Measure Theory in the metric setting, including the characterisations of rectifiability in terms of projections and in terms of tangent planes.
Dr Soheyla Feyzbakhsh, of Imperial College London, is awarded a Whitehead Prize for her spectacular applications of wall-crossing techniques to questions in classical and enumerative algebraic geometry.
Professor András Juhász, of the University of Oxford, is awarded a Whitehead Prize for his fundamental work in low-dimensional topology, in particular for applying Heegaard Floer homology to obtain a better understanding of knots, 3-manifolds, and 4-manifolds.
Professor Mahesh Kakde, of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, is awarded a Whitehead Prize for his outstanding contributions to Iwasawa theory and the solution of famous and important conjectures in number theory related to zeta and L-values, and for enormous advances on Hilbert’s 12th problem.
Dr Yankı Lekili, of Imperial College London, is awarded a Whitehead Prize for his illuminating and wide-reaching work in symplectic topology and homological mirror symmetry, and their connections to representation theory and arithmetic geometry.
Professor Marie-Therese Wolfram, of the University of Warwick, is awarded a Whitehead Prize for her groundbreaking contributions to applied partial differential equations, mathematical modelling in socio-economic applications and the life sciences, and numerical analysis of partial differential equations.
In addition, Professor Erhard Scholz, Emeritus Professor of the History of Mathematics at the University of Wuppertal, is awarded the Hirst Prize and Lectureship (awarded jointly with the British Society for the History of Mathematics). Professor Scholz’s distinguished academic career has spanned five decades. He has worked in many fields, always with high standards of scholarship and clarity, and is widely regarded as a leading historian of mathematics.
