David P. Robbins Prize

David P. Robbins Prize

This prize was established in 2005 in memory of David P. Robbins by members of his family.  Robbins, who died in 2003, received his Ph.D. in 1970 from MIT.  He was a long-time member of the Institute for Defense Analysis Center for Communications Research and a prolific mathematician whose work (much of it classified) was in discrete mathematics.  The prize is for a paper with the following characteristics:  it shall report on novel research in algebra, combinatorics or discrete mathematics and shall have a significant experimental component; and it shall be on a topic which is broadly accessible and shall provide a simple statement of the problem and clear exposition of the work.  The US$5,000 prize will be awarded every three years.

Next award:  January 2010.

First award, 2007:  To Samuel P. Ferguson and Thomas C. Hales, for the paper "A proof of the Kepler conjecture," by Thomas C. Hales, Annals of Mathematics, 162 (2005), 1065-1185 (Section 5 of this paper is jointly authored with Ferguson).