The Euler Book Prize is an award named after Swiss mathematician and physicist

Leonhard Euler Leonhard Euler ( , ; 15 April 170718 September 1783) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, logician and engineer who founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made pioneering and influential discoveries in ma ...

(1707-1783) and given annually at the

Joint Mathematics Meetings The Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) is a mathematics conference hosted annually in early January by the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Frequently, several other national mathematics organizations also participate. The meeting is the largest ...

by the Mathematical Association of America to an outstanding book in mathematics that is likely to improve the public view of the field.Euler Book Prize
The prize was founded in 2005 with funds provided by mathematician

Paul Halmos Paul Richard Halmos ( hu, Halmos Pál; March 3, 1916 – October 2, 2006) was a Hungarian-born American mathematician and statistician who made fundamental advances in the areas of mathematical logic, probability theory, statistics, operat ...

(1916–2006) and his wife Virginia. It was first given in 2007; this date was chosen to honor the 300th anniversary of Euler's birth, as part of the MAA "Year of Euler" celebration..

Winners

*2007:

John Derbyshire John Derbyshire (born 3 June 1945) is a British-born American far-right political commentator, writer, journalist and computer programmer. He was once known as a paleoconservative, until he was fired from the ''National Review'' in 2012 for w ...

, '' Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics'' (Joseph Henry Press, 2003). The main subject of this popular-audience book is the

Riemann hypothesis In mathematics, the Riemann hypothesis is the conjecture that the Riemann zeta function has its zeros only at the negative even integers and complex numbers with real part . Many consider it to be the most important unsolved problem in pu ...

, concerning the location of the zeros of the Riemann zeta function, and its application to the distribution of

prime number A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only way ...

s. Due to a miscommunication, Derbyshire missed the award ceremony. *2008:

Benjamin Yandell Benjamin Hart Yandell (16 March 1951, Pasadena – 25 August 2004, Pasadena) was an American author, known as the posthumous winner of the 2008 Euler Book Prize. He graduated in 1973 with a bachelor's degree from Stanford University. On 26 Augus ...

, ''The Honors Class: Hilbert's Problems and Their Solvers'' (AK Peters, 2002). This book intertwines the stories of the solutions to

Hilbert's problems Hilbert's problems are 23 problems in mathematics published by German mathematician David Hilbert in 1900. They were all unsolved at the time, and several proved to be very influential for 20th-century mathematics. Hilbert presented ten of the pr ...

with the biographies of its solvers. The award was given posthumously to Yandell, who died in 2004. *2009:

Siobhan Roberts Siobhan Roberts is a Canadian science journalist, biographer, and historian of mathematics. Education Roberts was born in Belleville, Ontario. She earned a degree in history at Queen's University, then a graduate degree in journalism from ...

, ''King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry'' (Walker and Company, 2006). This biography of

Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter Harold Scott MacDonald "Donald" Coxeter, (9 February 1907 – 31 March 2003) was a British and later also Canadian geometer. He is regarded as one of the greatest geometers of the 20th century. Biography Coxeter was born in Kensington ...

also describes the history of geometry and Coxeter's contributions to the field. *2010: David S. Richeson, '' Euler's Gem: The Polyhedron Formula and the Birth of Topology'' (Princeton University Press, 2008). Richeson relates the history of

Euler's formula Euler's formula, named after Leonhard Euler, is a mathematical formula in complex analysis that establishes the fundamental relationship between the trigonometric functions and the complex exponential function. Euler's formula states that for ...

connecting the numbers of vertices, edges, and faces of a

convex polyhedron A convex polytope is a special case of a polytope, having the additional property that it is also a convex set contained in the n-dimensional Euclidean space \mathbb^n. Most texts. use the term "polytope" for a bounded convex polytope, and the w ...

. The story leads from Euler's first observation in 1750 to modern

topology In mathematics, topology (from the Greek words , and ) is concerned with the properties of a geometric object that are preserved under continuous deformations, such as stretching, twisting, crumpling, and bending; that is, without closing ho ...

and the mathematics of

William Thurston William Paul Thurston (October 30, 1946August 21, 2012) was an American mathematician. He was a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology and was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982 for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds. Thursto ...

and

Grigori Perelman Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman ( rus, links=no, Григорий Яковлевич Перельман, p=ɡrʲɪˈɡorʲɪj ˈjakəvlʲɪvʲɪtɕ pʲɪrʲɪlʲˈman, a=Ru-Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman.oga; born 13 June 1966) is a Russian mathemati ...

. *2011:

Timothy Gowers Sir William Timothy Gowers, (; born 20 November 1963) is a British mathematician. He is Professeur titulaire of the Combinatorics chair at the Collège de France, and director of research at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity Col ...

, ''

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics ''The Princeton Companion to Mathematics'' is a book providing an extensive overview of mathematics that was published in 2008 by Princeton University Press. Edited by Timothy Gowers with associate editors June Barrow-Green and Imre Leader, it ...

'' (Princeton University Press, 2008). This book provides an overview of modern research mathematics; Gowers edited the contributions of 133 distinguished mathematicians as well as writing many of the entries in it himself. *2012:

Daina Taimiņa Daina Taimiņa (born August 19, 1954) is a Latvian mathematician, retired adjunct associate professor of mathematics at Cornell University, known for discovering a groundbreaking way of modelling hyperbolic planes by crocheting objects to illustr ...

, '' Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes'', A. K. Peters 2009 *2013:

Persi Diaconis Persi Warren Diaconis (; born January 31, 1945) is an American mathematician of Greek descent and former professional magician. He is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University. He is particularly know ...

Ronald Graham Ronald Lewis Graham (October 31, 1935July 6, 2020) was an American mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years". He ...

, ''Magical Mathematics: The Mathematical Ideas that Animate Great Magic Tricks'', Princeton University Press 2011 *2014:

Steven Strogatz Steven Henry Strogatz (), born August 13, 1959, is an American mathematician and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. He is known for his work on nonlinear systems, including contributions to the study ...

, ''The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity'', Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012 *2015:

Edward Frenkel Edward Vladimirovich Frenkel (; born May 2, 1968) is a Russian-American mathematician working in representation theory, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics. He is a professor of mathematics at University of California, Berkeley, a member ...

, '' Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality'', Basic Books, 2013 *2016:

Jordan Ellenberg Jordan Stuart Ellenberg (born October 30, 1971) is an American mathematician who is a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research involves arithmetic geometry. He is also an author of both fiction and non-ficti ...

, '' How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking'', Penguin Press, 2014 *2017: Ian Stewart, ''In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World'', Basic Books, New York, 2012 *2018:

Matt Parker Matthew Thomas Parker (born 22 December 1980) is an Australian recreational mathematician, author, comedian, YouTube personality and science communicator based in the United Kingdom. His book ''Humble Pi'' was the first maths book in the UK t ...

, ''Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension'', Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2014) *2019:

Cathy O'Neil Catherine ("Cathy") Helen O'Neil is an American mathematician, data scientist, and author. She is the author of the ''New York Times'' best-seller '' Weapons of Math Destruction'', and opinion columns in Bloomberg View. O'Neil was active in th ...

, ''

Weapons of Math Destruction ''Weapons of Math Destruction'' is a 2016 American book about the societal impact of algorithms, written by Cathy O'Neil. It explores how some big data algorithms are increasingly used in ways that reinforce preexisting inequality. It was longl ...

'', Crown, 2016 *2020: Tim Chartier, ''Math Bytes: Google Bombs, Chocolate-Covered Pi, and Other Cool Bits in Computing'', Princeton University Press, 2014 *2021:

Francis Su Francis Edward Su is an American mathematician. He joined the Harvey Mudd College faculty in 1996, and is currently Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics. Su served as president of the Mathematical Association of America from 2015–2017 ...

and Christopher Jackson, ''Mathematics for Human Flourishing'', Yale University Press (2020)JMM Prizebook 2021
/ref> *2022: Allison Henrich, Emille D. Lawrence, Matthew Pons, and David Taylor, eds., ''Living Proof: Stories of Resilience Along the Mathematical Journey'', MAA and AMS (2019)

References

{{reflist Awards of the Mathematical Association of America

Winners

See also

References