News

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has to-day awarded the Abel Prize jointly to Sir Michael Francis Atiyah and Isadore M. Singer.

Sir Michael Atiyah, OM, FRS, was elected to a Fellowship at St Catherine's College, Oxford, in 1961. He held the Savilian Chair of Geometry from 1963 to 1969. After three years at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, he returned to Oxford and held a Royal Society Research Chair at the Mathematical Institute until 1990, when he left to become Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Isadore Singer was a frequent visitor during Michael's long and distinguished Oxford career.

The Executive Committee of IMU meets in Oxford 23-24 April.

Marcus du Sautoy's diary for the Gulbenkian Foundation of what it is like to be a mathematician is book of the week on Radio 4. Marcus will be featured in the April edition of Esquire magazine as one of their 100 most influential people under the age of 40.

Dominic Joyce has been awarded this years Adams prize. This year's subject was Differential Geometry.

Professor Jean-Pierre Serre, the winner of the first Abel Prize, spoke at the algebra seminar.

Roger Heath-Brown was made an Honorary fellow of the Hardy-Ramanujan society in January.

David Acheson gave a Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution on 31 October 2003, in the famous lecture series founded in 1826 by Michael Faraday. The title was '1089 and All That'.

• Anton Evseev (St Annes) - Gibbs Prize
• Elizabeth Baldwin (Wadham) - Junior Mathematical Prize
• Jacob Krich (Balliol) - Proxime accessit Gibbs prize

Marcus du Sautoy: The Music of Primes

The first ever Ito prize has been awared to Ben Hambly, James Martin and Neil O'Connell for their paper 'Concentration results for a Brownian directed percolation problem'.

The prize has just been instituted and is awarded for a recent paper published in the journal 'Stochastic processes and their applications'. The prize was awarded in Rio at the annual conference on stochastic processes and their applications.