The winners of the London Mathematical Society Prizes for 2013 were announced at the Society meeting on 5 July 2013:

Professor Nick Trefethen has been awarded the Naylor Prize and Lectureship in Applied Mathematics on account of his exceptional contributions to Numerical Analysis and his undoubted ability to communicate this fascinating and central subject to a wider audience.

Professor Frances Kirwan is awarded a Senior Whitehead Prize for her work on geometric invariant theory and the geometry and topology of moduli spaces. Professor Kirwan has introduced many fundamental techniques and applied them to solve several outstanding problems, particularly involving moduli spaces of bundles.

Professor Fernando Alday is awarded a Whitehead Prize for his work on properties of supersymmetric gauge theory, and its connections with two dimensional conformal field theory and with string theory in anti-de-Sitter space.

Dr Tom Sanders is awarded a Whitehead Prize for his spectacular results in additive combinatorics and related areas. In particular he is recognised for his paper obtaining the best known upper bounds for sets of integers containing no 3-term arithmetic progressions, for his work dramatically improving bounds connected with Freiman's theorem on sets with small doubling, and for other results in additive combinatorics and harmonic analysis.

Congratulations to David Acheson who is to receive an Honorary D.Sc from the University of East Anglia, in recognition of his influential work in bringing mathematics to the general public. The degree will be conferred at a ceremony in July.

On 11/12/2012 Marcus du Sautoy received an honorary DSc from Queen Mary University of London today for services to mathematics and science.

Professor Marcus du Sautoy was named Honorary Doctor of Science by Professor Shahn Majid of Queen Mary’s School of Mathematical Sciences. Marcus du Sautoy is a TV and radio presenter, author, writer for the UK’s leading newspapers, the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College. He has lectured at Queen Mary on several occasions, including the First Drapers’ Lecture (2006) and the flagship William Harvey Day in 2010.

Professor du Sautoy says: “Queen Mary was the springboard for my career as a grown-up mathematician. Having completed my DPhil at Oxford, my first year as a post-doc was spent in the extremely stimulating environment of the mathematics department at Queen Mary. Since that time I have kept in contact with many of the mathematical friends I made during my time at the university. It is a great honour that Queen Mary has decided to recognise my contributions to mathematics and science with this award".

Further details available

Congratulations to Oxford student Jo French, who has won not only the Mathematics category but also the overall Student of the Year category at the SET Awards ceremony. The prize was for her project on Differential Operators on Base Affine Space. Her project supervisor, Kobi Kremnitzer, was thereby named Best Lecturer. There were more than 500 entries from more than 100 universities.