WASHINGTON, DC (July 28, 2022) – We are pleased to announce the 2022 award recipients for the Carl B. Allendoerfer Award, Trevor Evans Awards, the Paul R. Halmos-Lester R. Ford Award, the George Pólya Award, the Daniel Solow Author’s Award, The Chauvenet Prize, and the Euler Book Prize.
Carl B. Allendoerfer Awards
Kaity Parsons, Peter Tingley, and Emma Zajdela
“When to Hold ‘Em,” Mathematics Magazine, 94:3, pages 201-202. DOI: 10.1080/0025570X.2021.1908785
On receiving this award, Tingley said “It is a great honor and pleasure to accept this award, thank you! The whole process has been a wonderful experience, which I am grateful to have shared with these amazing students.”
David J. Hunter and Chisondi Warioba
Segregation Surfaces: Mathematics Magazine: Vol 94, 2021
“We are honored that our paper on segregation measures and visualization has been selected. Our hope is that this work will inspire other mathematical investigations into topics that address important questions,” Hunter said.
“As someone who speaks English as a second language, the ability to describe the world we live in with such universal descriptors will always take my breath away. It is an honor to contribute to this field and an even greater honor to be recognized as a recipient of this year’s Allendoerfer Award.”
Chisondi Warioba
Trevor Evans Award
Seth Colbert-Pollack, Judy Holdener, Emily Rachfal, and Yanqi Xu
“A DIY Project: Construct Your Own Multiply Perfect Number!” Math Horizons, 28:3 (February 2021) 20-23. DOI: 10.1080/10724117.2020.1849911
“We are surprised and honored to receive the Trevor Evans Award, and we are delighted that the algorithm discussed in our papers now appears in print – and in Math Horizons!” the team explained. “Details of the algorithm have never been formally published before…We are thrilled that a magazine for Undergraduates has closed this gap in the literature,” the recipients said.
Beckenbach Book Prize
Ron Taylor and Patrick X. Rault
A TeXas-Style Introduction to Proof, MAA Press, Washington, DC, 2017, xiv + 161 pp., (Reprinted by the AMS, 2018), which appears in the MAA Textbooks Series.
The duo shared, “The process of turning the book from unpolished notes to its current state was labor intensive and the resulting product owes its quality to many people… It is a great honor to be receiving the Beckenbach Book Prize.”
Paul R. Halmos-Lester R. Ford Award
William Dunham
“Euler and the Cubic Basel Problem,” The American Mathematical Monthly, 128:4, pp. 291-301. DOI: 10.1080/00029890.2021.1865014
Dunham stated, “I am most grateful to the MAA and to the Halmos-Ford committee for recognizing my article about Euler and the cubic Basel problem. What a thrill!”
Jan E. Holly
“What Type of Apollonian Circle Packing Will Appear?,” The American Mathematical Monthly, 128:7, pp. 611-629. DOI: 10.1080/00029890.2021.1933834
Holly shared, “In working on this problem of types of Apollonian circle packings, it was surprising how uncharted the territory was.”
“I am grateful to be honored and particularly excited about the prospect of additional results that readers may generate upon seeing the article,” she added.
Dominic Klyve and Erik R. Tou
“A Prime Testing Algorithm from Leonhard Euler,” The American Mathematical Monthly, 128:8, pp. 687-700. DOI: 10.1080/00029890.2021.1943118
The team shared, “It is an honor and a pleasure to receive this award from the MAA. Leonhard Euler’s number theory has been a long-standing interest to both of us and we very much enjoyed the historical and mathematical paths this paper took us down.”
“Euler’s work is but one piece of a larger puzzle, which we look forward to exploring in the future,” they added.
David Lowry-Duda and Miles H. Wheeler
“Perturbing the Mean Value Theorem: Implicit Functions, The Morse Lemma, and Beyond,” The American Mathematical Monthly, 128:1, pp. 50-61. DOI: 10.1080/00029890.2021.1840879
“We are humbled to have been selected to receive the Halmos-Ford Award for our article on perturbing the mean value theorem… it is an honor to contribute to this legacy [Monthly],” the pair stated. “As we attempted to distill our ideas to their simplest form, we learned a lot– both about fundamental analysis and about each other.”
George Pólya Award
Michelle Previte and Joseph Previte
“The Beautiful Chaotic Dynamics of iz,” The College Mathematics Journal, 52:5, 364–372. doi.org/10.1080/07468342.2021.1973820
“Part of the enterprise of mathematics is to convey ideas and concepts to others in a way that entertains and inspires. The College Mathematics Journal (CMJ) is at the forefront of this endeavor. So to learn that our article was recognized as making an excellent contribution to the CMJ was a surprising honor. However, upon further reflection, the structures that we discovered were so intrinsically striking and beautiful, our job was both a joy and relatively easy,” the pair shared.
Ezra (Bud) Brown and Adrian Rice
“Why Hamilton Couldn’t Multiply Triples,” The College Mathematics Journal, 52:3, 185–192. doi.org/10.1080/07468342.2021.1897418
“We are thrilled, honored, and grateful to the Pólya Committee for this award. We thank The College Mathematics Journaleditor Dominic Klyve and his staff of referees for accepting our paper and improving it with their comments and suggestions. This paper stemmed from our joint interest in the history of mathematics, especially in the mid-nineteenth century events that led up to the discoveries of the quaternions and the octonions,” the duo stated.
Daniel Solow Author’s Award
Maura Mast and Ethan Bolker
Common Sense Mathematics, Second Edition. AMS/MAA Textbooks, vol. 63, 2021.
“I am honored and delighted to share the Daniel Solow Author’s Award for Common Sense Mathematics. I’m pleased that this award is for the piece of my work that will mean the most to non-mathematicians. I thank the MAA three times: first for enthusiastically publishing the first edition, second for encouraging the second, and now for this award,” Bolker stated.
“I was completely surprised by this recognition and am quite humbled to receive this award! I want to convey my heartfelt thanks to UMass Boston for giving me and Ethan the flexibility to pursue this project and to Fordham for ongoing support; the MAA for offering so many resources for professional development; SIGMAA-QL for nurturing space for discussing quantitative reasoning teaching and learning; Dr. Solow for endowing the award; and the selection committee for their consideration,” Maura added.
The Chauvenet Prize
William Dunham
“The Early (and Peculiar) History of the Möbius Function,” Mathematics Magazine
“Receiving the 2022 Chauvenet Prize for my paper on the origins of the Möbius function is certainly a career highlight. This topic fell into my lap when I happened, by chance, upon the collected works of August Ferdinand Möbius in a dark and dusty corner of the Bryn Mawr College Library,” Dunham said, of his mathematical writing.
Ezra (Bud) Brown and Matthew Crawford
“Five Families Around a Well: A New Look at an Old Problem,” The College Mathematics Journal
“We are amazed, thrilled, and most grateful to the Chauvenet Prize Committee for this award. The story behind the paper being honored began with Tim Chartier’s absorbing book, Math Bytes, that contained a puzzle from the ancient Chinese work The Nine Chapters of the Mathematical Art,” the two responded to their accomplishment.
Euler Book Prize
Editors: Allison K. Henrich, Matthew A. Pons, Emille Davie Lawrence, David Taylor
Living Proof: Stories of Resilience Along the Mathematical Journey, 2019 Mathematical Association of America and American Mathematical Society.
I am grateful to the MAA for recognizing the narratives put forth in our book and the efforts that we, the editors, made in bringing those narratives to the fore.
Emille Davie Lawrence
“This project was such necessary labor of love for me, and I learned so much from the experience. We all struggle. We all face hardships. Yet, we find satisfaction in pushing against these hurdles and continue to persist through. This book means so much to me, and I am beyond appreciative that the MAA and the mathematics community at large find it just as valuable as I do. Thank you for this award,” Lawrence responded.
On winning this award Matthew stated, “It continues to remind us that while we are all human, our experiences can be wildly different as we walk the mathematical journey. Yes, the content can be difficult, but the discipline should be accessible to anyone who is eager to join us in our quest for knowledge. We all need to acknowledge the barriers that keep people out and work to tear those barriers down.”
“We are grateful to all of the Living Proof contributors for giving life to this project which has had such a huge impact on our community,” Henrich said.
“We needed to show everyone that, yes, there are people like you in mathematics and that, yes, you do belong and you can do this. I cannot express how much gratitude I have for Matthew Pons, other co-editors Allison Henrich and Emille Davie Lawrence, and all of the amazing people that contributed stories for our volume,” Taylor added.