Bôcher Memorial Prize

The Bôcher Memorial Prize was founded by the American Mathematical Society in 1923 in memory of Maxime Bôcher with an initial endowment of $1,450. It is awarded every three years for a notable research work in analysis that has appeared during the past six years. The work must be published in a recognized, peer-reviewed venue. The current award is $5,000.
There have been forty-one prize recipients. The first woman to win the award, Laure Saint-Raymond, did so in 2020. About eighty percent of the journal articles recognized since 2000 have been from Annals of Mathematics, the Journal of the American Mathematical Society, Inventiones Mathematicae, and Acta Mathematica.

Past winners

Source:

1923 George David Birkhoff for
1924 Eric Temple Bell for
1924 Solomon Lefschetz for
1928 James W. Alexander II for
1933 Marston Morse for
1933 Norbert Wiener for
1938 John von Neumann for
1943 Jesse Douglas for
1948 Albert Schaeffer and Donald Spencer for
1953 Norman Levinson for "his contributions to the theory of linear, nonlinear, ordinary, and partial differential equations contained in his papers of recent years"
1959 Louis Nirenberg for "his work in partial differential equations"
1964 Paul Cohen for
1969 Isadore Singer for "his work on the index problem" and especially
1974 Donald Samuel Ornstein for
1979 Alberto Calderón for "his fundamental work on the theory of singular integrals and partial differential equations" and in particular
1984 Luis Caffarelli for "his deep and fundamental work in nonlinear partial differential equations, in particular his work on free boundary problems, vortex theory and regularity theory"
1984 Richard Melrose for "his solution of several outstanding problems in diffraction theory and scattering theory and for developing the analytical tools needed for their resolution"
1989 Richard Schoen for "his work on the application of partial differential equations to differential geometry," in particular
1994 Leon Simon for:
1999 Demetrios Christodoulou for:
1999 Sergiu Klainerman for:
1999 Thomas Wolff for "his work in harmonic analysis," "harmonic measure, and unique continuation," including
2002 Daniel Tătaru for
2002 Terence Tao for
2002 Lin Fanghua for
2005 Frank Merle for "his fundamental work in the analysis of nonlinear dispersive equations" including:
2008 Alberto Bressan for:
2008 Charles Fefferman for "his many fundamental contributions to different areas of analysis" including
2008 Carlos Kenig for "his important contributions to harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, and nonlinear dispersive PDE" including:
2011 Assaf Naor for "introducing new invariants of metric spaces and for applying his new understanding of the distortion between various metric structures to theoretical computer science" and his "remarkable work on a lower bound in the sparsest cut problem" including
2011 Gunther Uhlmann for "his fundamental work on inverse problems" including
2014 Simon Brendle for "his outstanding solutions of long standing problems in geometric analysis", including
2017 András Vasy for
2020 Camillo De Lellis for "his innovative point of view on the construction of continuous dissipative solutions of the Euler equations, which ultimately led to Isett's full solution of the Onsager conjecture, and his spectacular work in the regularity theory of minimal surfaces, where he completed and improved Almgren's program" including:
2020 Lawrence Guth for "his deep and influential development of algebraic and topological methods for partitioning the Euclidean space and multi-scale organization of data, and his powerful applications of these tools in harmonic analysis, incidence geometry, analytic number theory, and partial differential equations" including:
2020 Laure Saint-Raymond for "her transformative contributions to kinetic theory, fluid dynamics, and Hilbert's sixth problem on 'developing mathematically the limiting processes...which lead from the atomistic view to the laws of motion of continua,'" including:
2023 Frank Merle, Pierre Raphaël, Igor Rodnianski, and Jérémie Szeftel for "their groundbreaking work establishing the existence of blow-up solutions to the defocusing NLS equation in some supercritical regimes and to the compressible Euler and Navier-Stokes equations" including
2026 Mihalis Dafermos, and Jonathan Luk for "their work on the C0- stability of the Kerr Cauchy horizon, which addresses the fundamental question of global uniqueness of solutions to the initial value problem for the Einstein equations of general relativity, disproves expectations, and calls for a rethinking of fundamental issues."
2026 Semyon Dyatlov, for his "pioneering work connecting the dynamics of geodesic flows and the behavior of waves. It also introduced a new family of questions in Fourier analysis, extending the classical Heisenberg uncertainty principle in a novel direction." Including: