Sylvester Medal facts for kids
The Sylvester Medal is a special bronze medal given by the Royal Society in London. It's awarded to people who do amazing work in mathematics. Along with the medal, the winner also gets a £1,000 prize!
This award is named after James Joseph Sylvester, a famous math professor at the University of Oxford in the 1880s. Friends of Sylvester, especially Raphael Meldola, suggested the award after Sylvester passed away in 1897. The first medal was given out in 1901.
At first, the medal was awarded every three years. It came with a prize of about £900. But starting in 2009, the Royal Society decided to give it out every two years instead. Now, it's meant for scientists who are earlier in their careers, not just those who are already very famous. A special committee at the Royal Society chooses the winner. This committee handles awards for physical sciences, like math.
As of 2021, 45 medals have been awarded. Most winners (35) have been from the United Kingdom. Two winners were from France and two from the United States. Other winners came from New Zealand, Germany, Austria, Russia, Italy, Sweden, and South Africa. So far, three women have won the medal: Mary Cartwright in 1964, Dusa McDuff in 2018, and Frances Kirwan in 2021.
Amazing Math Winners
| Year | Name | Nationality | Why they won |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1901 | Henri Poincaré | French | For his important work in pure and applied mathematics, physics, and how things move in space. He helped create chaos theory and topology. |
| 1904 | Georg Cantor | German | He invented set theory, which is a basic part of mathematics. He studied infinite sets and showed that some infinities are "bigger" than others. |
| 1907 | Wilhelm Wirtinger | Austrian | For his work on functions, geometry, algebra, and number theory. |
| 1910 | Henry Frederick Baker | British | For his work in algebraic geometry and his contributions to Lie groups. He also helped publish James Joseph Sylvester's math works. |
| 1913 | James Whitbread Lee Glaisher | British | For his work in number theory and the study of elliptic functions. |
| 1916 | Jean Gaston Darboux | French | For his important contributions to geometry and mathematical analysis. |
| 1919 | Percy Alexander MacMahon | British | For his work on how numbers can be divided into parts and his studies in enumerative combinatorics. He also created fun math puzzles. |
| 1922 | Tullio Levi-Civita | Italian | For his major work in many math areas, especially tensor calculus and its use in theory of relativity. He also studied how things move. |
| 1925 | Alfred North Whitehead | British | For his work on the basic ideas of mathematics. He also wrote about algebra, logic, and philosophy. |
| 1928 | William Henry Young | British | For his work on the theory of functions, including measure theory and Fourier series. |
| 1931 | Edmund Taylor Whittaker | British | For his important work in both pure and applied mathematics, and his contributions to mathematical physics. |
| 1934 | Bertrand Russell | British | For his excellent work on the basic ideas of mathematics. He was also a famous philosopher and logician. |
| 1937 | Augustus Edward Hough Love | British | For his work on the math of elasticity (how things stretch and bend) and how liquids move. He also studied waves and tides. |
| 1940 | Godfrey Harold Hardy | British | For his important work in many areas of pure mathematics. |
| 1943 | John Edensor Littlewood | British | For his math discoveries and deep understanding in the analytical theory of numbers. |
| 1946 | George Neville Watson | British | For his great contributions to pure mathematics, especially in mathematical analysis. |
| 1949 | Louis Joel Mordell | British | For his excellent research in pure mathematics, especially his discoveries in number theory. |
| 1952 | Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch | Russian | For his outstanding work on functions and the theory of measure and integration. |
| 1955 | Edward Charles Titchmarsh | British | For his important research on the Riemann zeta-function, Fourier analysis, and number theory. |
| 1958 | Max Newman | British | For his great contributions to topology, Boolean algebras, and mathematical logic. |
| 1961 | Philip Hall | British | For his important research in algebra. |
| 1964 | Mary Cartwright | British | For her great contributions to analysis and the theory of functions. |
| 1967 | Harold Davenport | British | For his many important contributions to number theory. |
| 1970 | George Frederick James Temple | British | For his many great contributions to applied mathematics. |
| 1973 | John William Scott Cassels | British | For his many important contributions to number theory. |
| 1976 | David George Kendall | British | For his many great contributions to probability theory and its uses. |
| 1979 | Graham Higman | British | For his important and influential work on the theory of groups. |
| 1982 | John Frank Adams | British | For solving several big problems in algebraic topology and creating new methods to do so. |
| 1985 | John Griggs Thompson | American | For his basic work that helped classify all finite simple groups. |
| 1988 | Charles T. C. Wall | British | For his contributions to the topology of manifolds and related areas in algebra and geometry. |
| 1991 | Klaus Friedrich Roth | British | For his many contributions to number theory, especially solving a famous problem about approximating numbers. |
| 1994 | Peter Whittle | New Zealand | For his major contributions to time series analysis, optimisation theory, and applied probability theory. |
| 1997 | Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter | British/Canadian | For his achievements in geometry, especially how shapes and patterns are arranged in space. |
| 2000 | Nigel James Hitchin | British | For his important contributions to differential geometry and how it connects with physics. |
| 2003 | Lennart Carleson | Swedish | For his deep and basic contributions to mathematics in the field of analysis and complex dynamics. |
| 2006 | Peter Swinnerton-Dyer | British | For his basic work in arithmetic geometry and his many contributions to the theory of ordinary differential equations. |
| 2009 | John M. Ball | British | For his important work in mechanics and nonlinear analysis, and for encouraging math research in developing countries. |
| 2010 | Graeme Segal | British | For his very influential work on topology, geometry, and quantum field theory, connecting physics and pure mathematics. |
| 2012 | John Francis Toland | British/Irish | For his original theorems and amazing discoveries in nonlinear partial differential equations, including how they apply to water waves. |
| 2014 | Ben Green | British | For his famous result on prime numbers and other spectacular theorems he proved. |
| 2016 | Timothy Gowers | British | For his groundbreaking results in the theory of Banach spaces, combinatorics, and additive number theory. |
| 2018 | Dusa McDuff | British | For leading the development of the new field of symplectic geometry and topology. |
| 2019 | Peter Sarnak | American/South African | For his amazing contributions across number theory, combinatorics, analysis, and geometry. |
| 2020 | Bryan John Birch | British | For his work on the theory of elliptic curves. |
| 2021 | Frances Kirwan | British | For her research in algebraic geometry and its connections to symplectic geometry and topology. |
| 2022 | Roger Heath-Brown | British | For his many important contributions to studying prime numbers and solving equations with whole numbers. |
| 2023 | Miles Reid | British | For his very creative research and insights into higher-dimensional algebraic geometry, and for helping the community of algebraic geometers. |
See also
- List of mathematics awards
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Sylvester Medal Facts for Kids. Kiddle Encyclopedia.