# London Mathematical Society Prizes 2012

The London Mathematical Society has announced the recipients of its prizes, to be presented at the Society’s AGM in November.

#### Pólya Prize

The Pólya Prize (not to be confused with the one given about by SIAM or the MAA’s George Pólya Award) is “awarded in recognition of outstanding creativity in, imaginative exposition of, or distinguished contribution to, mathematics within the United Kingdom”. This year it goes to Professor Dan Segal (Oxford) for his “major contributions to group theory”.

#### Fröhlich Prize

The Fröhlich Prize, awarded in even-numbered years for “original and extremely innovative work in any branch of mathematics” to someone who has less than 25 years’ involvement in post-doctoral maths and hasn’t won the De Morgan or Pólya prizes, goes to Professor Trevor Wooley FRS (Bristol) for “his work in analytic number theory, and in particular his spectacular advances in the study of Waring’s problem on representing integers as a sum of $k$th powers”.

#### Senior Berwick Prize

The Senior Berwick Prize is awarded in even-numbered years “to the author(s) of an outstanding piece of mathematical research actually published by the Society” in the preceding eight years. Professor Ian Agol (U Illinois at Chicago) won the prize this year for his paper “Criteria for virtual fibering“.

Whitehead Prizes are awarded to mathematicians resident in the UK who aren’t already Fellows of the Royal Society or recipients of another LMS prize and who have less than 15 years’ involvement in post-doctoral maths. The LMS says that “grounds for the award of a Whitehead Prize may include work in and influence on mathematics” which I think means they’re awarded to people who deserve a prize for basically any reason.

Dr Toby Gee (Imperial) is awarded a Whitehead Prize for his work in number theory, and in particular his many contributions to the theory of automorphic forms.

Dr Eugen Vărvărucă (Reading) is awarded a Whitehead Prize for ground-breaking analysis of free boundary problems for linear and nonlinear elliptic equations, with important applications, in arbitrary dimensions.

Dr Sarah Waters (Oxford) is awarded a Whitehead Prize for her contributions to the fields of physiological fluid mechanics and the biomechanics of artificially engineered tissues.

Dr Andreas Winter (Bristol) is awarded a Whitehead Prize for his major contributions to key areas of quantum information theory.

Sources:

List of 2012 prizes from the LMS

LMS Prize regulations