George David Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics


The George David Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics is a joint award by the American Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. It is awarded every three years:-
... for an outstanding contribution to applied mathematics in the highest and broadest sense.
The initial endowment came from the family of G D Birkhoff and the prize is restricted to a member of one of the two societies who is resident in the United States, Canada, or Mexico.

1968 Jürgen K Moser
... for his contributions to the theory of Hamiltonian dynamical systems, especially his proof of the stability of periodic solutions of Hamiltonian systems having two degrees of freedom and his specific applications of the ideas in connection with this work.
1973 Fritz John
... for his outstanding work in partial differential equations, in numerical analysis, and, particularly, in nonlinear elasticity theory; the latter work has led to his study of quasi-isometric mappings as well as functions of bounded mean oscillation, which have had impact in other areas of analysis.
1973 James B Serrin
... for his fundamental contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations, especially his work on existence and regularity theory for nonlinear elliptic equations, and applications of his work to the theory of minimal surfaces in higher dimensions.
1978 Garrett Birkhoff
... for bringing the methods of algebra and the highest standards of mathematics to scientific applications.
1978 Mark Kac
... for his important contributions to statistical mechanics and to probability theory and its applications.
1978 Clifford A Truesdell
... for his outstanding contributions to our understanding of the subjects of rational mechanics and nonlinear materials, for his efforts to give precise mathematical formulation to these classical subjects, for his many contributions to applied mathematics in the fields of acoustic theory, kinetic theory, and nonlinear elastic theory, and the thermodynamics of mixtures, and for his major work in the history of mechanics.
1983 Paul R Garabedian
... for his important contributions to partial differential equations, to the mathematical analysis of problems of transonic flow and airfoil design by the method of complexification, and to the development and application of scientific computing to problems of fluid dynamics and plasma physics.
1988 Elliott H Lieb
... for his profound analysis of problems arising in mathematical physics.
1994 Ivo Babuska
... for important contributions to the reliability of finite element methods, the development of a general framework for finite element error estimation, and the development of p and h-p finite element methods; and to S R S Varadhan for important contributions to the martingale characterization of diffusion processes, to the theory of large deviations for functionals of occupation times of Markov processes, and to the study of random media.
1998 Paul H Rabinowitz
... for his deep influence on the field of non-linear analysis.
2003 John Mather
... for being a mathematician of exceptional depth, power, and originality; and to Charles S Peskin for devoting much of his career to understanding the dynamics of the human heart and bringing an extraordinarily broad range of expertise to bear on this problem.
2006 Cathleen Synge Morawetz
... for her deep and influential work in partial differential equations, most notably in the study of shock waves, transonic flow, scattering theory, and conformally invariant estimates for the wave equation.
2009 Joel Smoller
... for his leadership, originality, depth, and breadth of work in dynamical systems, differential equations, mathematical biology, shock wave theory, and general relativity.
2012 Bjorn Engquist
... for his contributions to a wide range of powerful computational methods over more than three decades.
2015 Emmanuel Candès
... for his work on compressed sensing that has revolutionized signal processing and medical imaging and his related work on computational harmonic analysis, statistics and scientific computing.
2018 Bernd Sturmfels
... for his instrumental role in creating the field of applied algebraic geometry.
2021 Gunther Uhlmann
... for his fundamental and insightful contributions to inverse problems and partial differential equations, as well as for his incisive work on boundary rigidity, microlocal analysis and cloaking.
2024 Ronald Coifman
... for his profound impact on pure and applied harmonic analysis, and for the introduction of tools developed from these areas to address modern challenges of data science.


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