I. Martin Isaacs Prize for Excellence in Mathematical Writing
Image Courtesy of Yvonne Nagel
About this Prize
The prize focuses on the attributes of excellent writing, including clarity, grace, and accessibility; the quality of the research is implied by the article's publication 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 prize selection criterion.
Professor Isaacs is the author of several graduate-level textbooks and of about 200 research papers on finite groups and their characters, with special emphasis on groups-such as solvable groups-that have an abundance of normal subgroups. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and received teaching awards from the University of Wisconsin and from the School of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin. He is especially proud of his 29 successful PhD students.
The current prize amount is US$5,000, and the prize is awarded every two years.
Most Recent Prize(s): 2025Ben Green, Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics, University of Oxford, will receive the inaugural I. Martin Isaacs Prize for Excellence in Mathematical Writing for his article "On Sárközy's theorem for shifted primes," published in Journal of the American Mathematical Society in 2024.
Prize announcement as seen in the news release.
See previous winnersNext Prize: January 2027
Nomination Period: 1 February - 31 May, 2026
Nomination Procedure:
Nominations with supporting information should be submitted online. Nominations should include a letter of nomination, a short description of the work that is the basis of the nomination, and a complete bibliographic citation for the article being nominated.