Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics

This prize was established in 1990 using funds donated by Joan S. Birman in memory of her sister, Ruth Lyttle Satter. Professor Birman requested that the prize be established to honor her sister's commitment to research and to encouraging women in science. The US$5,000 prize is awarded every two years to recognize an outstanding contribution to mathematics research by a woman in the previous six years.

Next award:  January 2009. Call for nominations.

Ninth award, 2007 :  To Claire Voisin for her deep contributions to algebraic geometry, and in particular for her recent solutions to two long-standing open problems:  the Kodaira problem ("On the homotopy types of compact Kähler and complex projective manifolds", Inventiones Mathematicae, 157 (2004), no. 2, 329-343) and  Green's Conjecture ("Green's canonical syzygy conjecture for generic curves of odd genus," Compositio Mathematica, 141 (2005), no. 5, 1163-1190; and "Green's generic syzygy conjecture for curves of even genus lying on a K3 surface," Journal of the European Mathematical Society, 4 (2002), no. 4, 363-404).

Eighth award, 2005 :  To Svetlana Jitomirskaya for her pioneering work on non-perturbative quasiperiodic localization, in particular for results in her papers (1) "Metal-insulator transition for the almost Mathieu operator," Ann. of Math. (2) 150 (1999), no. 3, 1159-1175, and (2) with J. Bourgain, "Absolutely continuous spectrum for 1D quasiperiodic operators," Invent. Math. 148 (2002), no. 3, 453-463.

Seventh award, 2003 : To Abigail Thompson for her outstanding work in 3-dimensional topology.

Sixth award, 2001 : To Karen E. Smith for her outstanding work in commutative algebra, and to Sijue Wu for her work on a long-standing problem in the water wave equation.

Fifth award, 1999 : To Bernadette Perrin-Riou for her number theoretical research on p-adic L-functions and Iwasawa theory.

Fourth award, 1997 : To Ingrid Daubechies for her deep and beautiful analysis of wavelets and their applications.

Third award, 1995 : To Sun-Yung Alice Chang for her deep contributions to the study of partial differential equations on Riemannian manifolds and in particular for her work on extremal problems in spectral geometry and the compactness of isospectral metrics within a fixed conformal class on a compact 3-manifold.

Second award, 1993: To Lai-Sang Young for her leading role in the investigation of the statistical (or ergodic) properties of dynamical systems.

First award, 1991: To Dusa McDuff for her outstanding work during the past five years on symplectic geometry.