Original AMS zzllrr Xiaole
Ben Greene wins the inaugural (2025) Martin Isaacs Award.
Author: AMS American Mathematical Society website 2024-11-26
Translator: zzllrr Xiaole (mathematics popular science public account) 2024-11-27
Ben Green FRS, Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford (Ben Green, Fellow of the Royal Society, 1977-), for his article “On Shifts” published in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society in 2024 “The Sárközy theorem of prime numbers (shifted primes, numbers in the form p-1, where p is a prime number)” (104 pages in total) won the first (2025) I. Martin Isaacs Martin Isaacs Award for Excellence in Mathematical Writing.
Ben Green Ben Green
Source: Liubov Yevenok
Award Citation
… Green successfully balances the issue of serving different audiences. An expert can easily extract the key ideas from his paper, while a beginner can understand the motivation and background of the techniques. Those who want to examine the details will find every detail they can get, while those who are trying to understand the big picture will also find what they need. Green’s paper is a joy to read, and his effort and writing skills are an excellent example of how to communicate (technically) daunting mathematics.
Ben Green’s response
I am delighted to receive this award as writing is something that I have always taken very seriously. I am particularly pleased that the award is associated with I. Martin Isaacs (1940-), whose famous work on character theory, The Theory of Finite Groups, which I have owned and enjoyed reading since undergraduate school. Character Theory of Finite Groups”. Although the winning paper was a single author, I learned a lot about how to write mathematics from several collaborators over the years. Let me mention in particular Terence Tao (1975-), with whom I co-authored more than 30 papers and who taught me a lot about how to structure proofs; my first co-author Imre Roux Imre Ruzsa (1953-), whose writing is unusually clear and elegant; and my PhD supervisor, Timothy Gowers (1963) -), his papers are always a joy to read.
Ben Green’s biography
Ben Green was born and raised in Bristol, England, where he attended local schools. He received his undergraduate and postgraduate education at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received his PhD in 2003 under the supervision of Timothy Gowers. He served as a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity, a Clay Research Fellow and a Postdoctoral Fellow at PIMS before returning to Cambridge in 2006 to become the first Herchel Smith Professor of Pure Mathematics. In 2013 he moved to Oxford as Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics and Fellow of Magdalen College. He is married and has two sons, aged 8 and 6 years old.
He has previously received the following awards:
Clay Research Award (2004)
Salem Prize (2005)
Whitehead Prize (2005)
SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (2007)
European Mathematical Society Award EMS Prize (2008)
Fellow of the Royal Society (2010)
Sylvester Medal (2014)
Senior Whitehead Prize (2019)
See: Xiaole Mathematics Science: The 2024 Salem Prize is awarded to Miguel Walsh and Wang Yilin
About the Martin Isaacs Award
The I. Martin Isaacs Award is awarded annually for outstanding writing of a research paper published in a major AMS journal during the past two years.
The award focuses on the qualities of good writing, including clarity, elegance and ease of understanding. The quality of the research is reflected by the publication of the article in Communications of the AMS, Journal of the AMS, Mathematics of Computation, Memoirs, Proceedings of the AMS or Transactions of the AMS and is therefore not a selection criterion for the award. The current prize amount is $5,000.
The award will be presented at the 2025 Joint Mathematics Conference in Seattle.
References
http://www.ams.org/news?news_id=7396
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Isaacs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Green_(mathematician)
