SIAM News Blog
Awards and Recognition

Joint Mathematics Meetings 2025 Prize Spotlight

Congratulations to the following 2025 SIAM joint prize recipients and lecturers! All award recipients will be recognized at the 2025 Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM 2025), to be held in Seattle, Washington, U.S., from January 8 – 11, 2025.

Photo Credit: Brian McConkey
Photo Credit: Brian McConkey

Eugenia Cheng

Dr. Eugenia Cheng, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is the 2025 recipient of the JPBM Communications Award “for her remarkable work bringing mathematics, mathematical ideas, and mathematical art to a wide audience through a multitude of books and other media.”

Dr. Cheng will be recognized during the Awards Celebration at JMM 2025, to take place on Wednesday, January 8 at 4:45 p.m. PST.

The Joint Policy Board for Mathematics (JPBM) established the JPBM Communications Award in 1988 to reward and encourage communicators who, on a sustained basis, bring mathematical ideas and information to non-mathematical audiences. Since 2016, the prize may be awarded in two categories: For Public Outreach and For Expository and Popular Books. Up to two awards are made annually.

JPBM is a collaborative effort of SIAM, the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the American Statistical Association (ASA), and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA).

Dr. Cheng is a mathematician, educator, author, public speaker, concert pianist, artist, and composer. She is Scientist in Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and won tenure at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. She previously taught at the universities of Cambridge, Chicago, and Nice, and holds a Ph.D. in pure mathematics from the University of Cambridge. Alongside Dr. Cheng’s research in category theory and undergraduate teaching, her aim is to rid the world of math phobia. She was an early pioneer of math on YouTube and her videos have been viewed over 20 million times to date.

Dr. Cheng has also assisted with mathematics in elementary, middle, and high schools for 20 years. Her first popular math book, How to Bake Pi, was featured on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert; Beyond Infinity was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2017; and Is Math Real won the LA Times Book Prize for Science and Technology. She has also written two children's books, and her books have been translated into 20 languages. She wrote the “Everyday Math” column for the Wall Street Journal, which ran for eight years, and has completed mathematical art commissions at Hotel EMC2, 6018 North, the Lubeznik Center, the Cultural Center, Chicago, and EXPO Chicago.

Moreover, Dr. Cheng was a composer for Lynx Project Amplify (2022-23), which commissions songs setting poetry by primarily non-speaking autistic poets. Her song "The Mother Who Died, Too" was commissioned for Laura Strickling's 40@40 project, the recording of which has been nominated for a GRAMMY award. She is also the founder of the Liederstube, an intimate oasis for art song based in Chicago. Her next book, Unequal: The mathematics of when things do and don't add up, will be published in 2025. Learn more about Dr. Cheng.

Q: Why are you excited to receive the award?

A: It is moving and galvanizing to be recognized for the work I have done over my varied and surprising career. It has not been easy working to bring more people into mathematics. Unfortunately, I have often met with opposition and obstruction, from people who want to keep mathematics exclusive, or who, in particular, don't want someone like me to be successful. What keeps me going is the support and appreciation of those around me. I also have a deep, unshakeable belief that mathematics is a profoundly empowering skill to which everyone deserves access and can access with the right help. So, for me, this prize is not just a celebration of my work so far, but a source of galvanizing energy for the work I will continue to do.

Q: What does your work mean to the public?

A: Some of my more standard academic work is work that I always wanted to do. But some of my work—books and other outreach—is work to which I felt driven later on, when I had a better understanding of who needed more help with mathematics, and how I could best use my abilities to offer that help. As I progressed through academia, I felt more and more strongly about this sort of public work because I see so many people dismiss math by their past experiences of it. I want to reach as many people as possible outside the academic mathematical community, including children and adults, especially people who previously thought math is not for them.

Q: Could you tell us about the research that won you the award?

A: The award was for my communication, which includes writing books for general audiences at various levels. Some are for children, some are a little more technical, but most are for general audiences from keen children to nervous adults. I also do a lot of public speaking and television/radio appearances, as well as completing several mathematical art commissions. I combine math with art and music in many of my public interactions and have given many presentations on math and music in which I perform at the piano and other instruments, sometimes with a singer. I also visit schools and give presentations to teachers and students of all ages, and I run a high school summer camp in Chicago that is non-competitive.

Interested in submitting a nomination for a future JPBM Communications Award? The AMS accepts nominations year-round - submit a nomination.

Robert McCann

Dr. Robert McCann, University of Toronto, is the 2025 recipient of the AMS-SIAM Norbert Wiener Prize “in recognition of his groundbreaking contributions to optimal transport theory, and for pioneering deep applications to economics and physics.”

Dr. McCann will be recognized during the Awards Celebration at JMM 2025, to take place on Wednesday, January 8 at 4:45 p.m. PST.

Established in 1967, this prize honors Norbert Wiener, a founder of the field of cybernetics. The prize is awarded every three years by SIAM and the AMS and recognizes outstanding contributions to applied mathematics in the highest and broadest sense. The prize is administered by the AMS.

Dr. McCann studied engineering and physics before graduating with a degree in mathematics from Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario, and a doctorate from Princeton University. Following a Tamarkin appointment at Brown University and a postdoctoral fellowship at Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES), he became a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto, where he now holds a Canada Research Chair in Mathematics, Economics, and Physics.

Dr. McCann is an authority on optimal transportation and has played a pioneering role in its rapid development since the 1990s. In particular, the notion of displacement convexity introduced in his 1994 Ph.D. thesis lies behind many of the area's myriad applications.

He serves on the editorial board of various journals, and as editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Mathematics since 2007, with a hiatus from 2017-21. His research has been recognized by awards such as an invitation to lecture at the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul; election to the Royal Society of Canada (2014); the 2017 Jeffery-Williams Prize of the Canadian Mathematical Society; and SIAM's 2023 W. T. and Idalia Reid Prize. Learn more about Professor McCann.

Q: Why are you excited to receive the award?

A: I am humbled and honored to have my work on optimal transport and its applications to economics and physics recognized by the AMS-SIAM Norbert Wiener Prize, endowed by MIT. I think the whole optimal transport community can join me in taking pride in this acknowledgement of the success and impact of our efforts. I am a great admirer of the work of Norbert Wiener and of many previous recipients of the prize.

Q: What does your work mean to the public?

A: Optimal transport has become a very active area of mathematics over the 30 years of my career. Its impact is being felt in applications ranging from image processing and medical diagnostics to atmospheric modeling to nonlinear dynamics and machine learning. As usual, the mathematics is under the hood, so the public is probably unaware of it. I have been working on applications to optimal decision making facing informational asymmetry. Such research can be used both by corporations trying to maximize profits and by public organizations trying to maximize the impact of the services they provide. It is up to all of us to try to ensure that the power of knowledge and new discoveries are harnessed for the benefit rather than the oppression of mankind.

Q: Could you tell us about the research that won you the award?

A: Optimal transportation has been a lens through which I’ve been able to learn and contribute to the development of many topics in science. In my early work I was able to use optimal transport to prove new families of inequalities, which turn out to characterize the presence of absence of Ricci curvature. More recently, I’ve applied these ideas to extend the formulation of Einstein’s theory of gravity to nonsmooth settings. I hope this will shed new light on the singular behavior of the universe we live in, from black holes to the Big Bang.

Q: What does being a member of SIAM mean to you?

A: I’ve been a SIAM member for close to 20 years and have proudly served on the editorial board of SIAM Journal of Mathematical Analysis for most of that time. I love the international nature of SIAM, and the activity groups and student chapters which provide a big tent model for outreach and inclusivity.

Interested in submitting a nomination for a future AMS-SIAM Norbert Wiener Prize? Mark your calendar - the AMS will begin accepting nominations again on February 1, 2027.

Victor H. Moll

Dr. Victor H. Moll, Tulane University, will deliver the 2025 MAA-SIAM-AMS Hrabowski-Gates-Tapia-McBay Lecture. His lecture, titled “Integral Tales: Some Unexpected Connections,” will be given at JMM 2025 on Friday, January 10 at 9:00 a.m. PST.

The MAA-SIAM-AMS Hrabowski-Gates-Tapia-McBay (HGTM) Lecture is named after four influential scientists of color: Freeman Hrabowski, President of the University of Maryland at Baltimore County; James S. Gates, University of Maryland, College Park; Richard Tapia, Rice University; and Shirley McBay, Founder and former President of Quality Education for Minorities. This lecture started in 2016 as an activity of the Mathematical Association of America’s Committee on Minority Participation and became a jointly sponsored MAA-SIAM-AMS event in 2018.

Dr. Moll, originally from Santiago, Chile, developed an interest in mathematics after initially considering engineering. He began teaching in 1978 at Universidad Santa Maria in Valparaiso, Chile, before attending graduate school at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, where he became a student of Henry McKean. Since 1986, he has been at Tulane University, where he is currently a professor of mathematics.

Dr. Moll enjoys working with undergraduate and graduate students, as well as young faculty. Summer opportunities such as the Summer Institute in Mathematics for Undergraduates at the University of Puerto Rico, the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute MSRI Undergraduate Program, and Research Experiences for Undergraduate Faculty annual workshops at ICERM have allowed him to share his research with students. 

Q: Why are you excited to receive the award?

A: This is an unexpected honor for me. It will give me the opportunity to tell a global story of what I work on and how I got there. Since it is an unusual path, it is my goal to tell students in the audience that there are many paths that can be satisfying. I see this award as a recognition of the work done with a large number of students and colleagues. They deserve it as much as I do.

Q: What does your work mean to the public?

A: The general public sees mathematics as a very obscure and complicated subject. Most of the time this is based on bad experiences at the early parts of education, even at the university level. My goal is to illustrate that, with not too much background, one can encounter pretty phenomena and that this can be made accessible.

Q: Could you tell us about the research that won you the award?

A: My current research centers around a basic question: Is it possible to find a universal algorithm for integration? Every student learns in basic courses that differentiation is a basic operation that can be reduced to an algorithm: There is a small collection of rules from which everything else follows. No such algorithm exists for integration, and the search for such an algorithm has led me and my collaborators to many interesting questions in several, apparently disconnected, parts of mathematics. Being a strong believer in the unity of mathematics, this does not surprise me.

The talk I will give at JMM 2025 will illustrate a method that originated in the evaluation of Feynman diagrams and that we believe it could become an efficient universal algorithm.

Q: What does being a member of SIAM mean to you?

A: SIAM has played an important role in my career. My first talk was at a SIAM conference in Pittsburgh.  I believe that giving a talk using chalk is best because it allows you to engage with the audience and adapt when certain points are not well understood. However, for my first talk, I was convinced to prepare for it using transparencies. The meeting was held in a hotel without blackboards, so I ended up being saved. The foolishness of youth.

I strongly recommend my students become SIAM members and support the local student chapter. I have participated in many SIAM conferences.

Know someone who would be a great HGTM Lecturer? The AMS collects recommendations year-round - suggest a speaker.

Kenta Suzuki

Kenta Suzuki, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the 2025 recipient of the Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student “for his extraordinary research in the representation theory of p-adic groups. His papers, including two solo works, represent significant progress in different areas of the field.”

Suzuki will be recognized during the Awards Celebration at JMM 2025, to take place on Wednesday, January 8 at 4:45 p.m. PST.

The Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize is awarded annually for outstanding research in mathematics by an undergraduate student (or students having submitted joint work). Students in Canada, Mexico, or the U.S. and its territories are eligible for consideration for the prize. The prize is given jointly by the AMS, the MAA, and SIAM, and the recipients are chosen by a joint selection committee.

Kenta Suzuki is a fourth-year undergraduate at MIT from Tokyo, Japan, and Plymouth, Michigan. His work focuses on the representation theory of p-adic groups and geometric representation theory. He is particularly interested in applying geometric methods to solve problems of representation theory. In his free time, he runs, reads, and is slowly learning how to cook. Learn more about Kenta Suzuki.

Q: Why are you excited to receive the award?

A: I am very honored to receive the Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student. I thank the Morgan family and the AMS, MAA, and SIAM for their generosity.

Q: What does your work mean to the public?

A: My work is on the representation theory of p-adic groups, which has important applications to number theory, particularly to the theory of automorphic forms. I also worked on geometric representation theory, i.e., using geometric techniques to solve problems in representation theory. In my work with Vasily Krylov, we computed characters of representations of affine Lie algebras, which has applications to superconformal field theory in physics. I am interested in connecting these ideas.

Q: Could you tell us about the research that won you the award?

A: In joint work with Yujie Xu, I proved the Local Langlands Conjecture for G2 and GSp4 explicitly—the conjecture predicts a correspondence between representations of p-adic groups and Galois representations. I also proved Bezrukanikov, Braverman, and Kazhdan's conjecture on the cocenter of the Hecke algebra, which is an object containing important information about the characters of representations of p-adic groups. In joint work with Vasily Krylov, I computed new character formulas for affine Lie algebras using the geometry of Springer fibers.

Interested in submitting a nomination for the Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize? The prize next opens for nominations on February 1, 2025.

Ravi Vakil

Dr. Ravi Vakil, Stanford University, will deliver the 2025 AMS-MAA-SIAM Gerald and Judith Porter Public Lecture. His lecture, titled “The Mathematics of Doodling,” will be given at JMM 2025 on Saturday, January 11 at 2:15 p.m. PST.

The Gerald and Judith Porter Public Lecture is given every year at the Joint Mathematics Meetings on a mathematical topic accessible to the broader community. The Porter Public Lecture series is offered jointly by the MAA, AMS, and SIAM.

Dr. Vakil is the Robert Grimmett Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University, and the President-Elect of the American Mathematical Society. He is an algebraic geometer, whose work touches on topology, string theory, applied mathematics, combinatorics, number theory, and more.

His research awards include the Centennial Fellowship from the American Mathematical Society, the Coxeter-James Prize from the Canadian Mathematical Society, a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. He also has received the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching and was the Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.

He co-founded the web resource MathOverflow and the San Francisco educational institution Proof School, which serves grades 6–12. He remains on the boards of both. He also is on the board of the nonprofit National Math Stars, which has just launched with 16.5 million dollars of initial funding and aims to ensure mathematically extraordinary students from all communities have the resources they need to reach the frontiers of math and science. Learn more about Dr. Vakil.

Q: Why are you excited to receive the award?

A: The Gerald and Judith Porter Public Lecture gives me a chance to help us explain to the public what mathematics and science is all about: looking at the world, asking certain kinds of questions, discovering patterns, learning new things, and then asking new questions. Because mathematics is so powerful and so useful, most people only see it in classes as a tool for other ends. This lecture is an opportunity to show everyone the bigger picture, that the reason for the power of our way of thinking is inherently tied together with beauty of hidden structures behind everything we see.

Q: What does your work mean to the public?

A: My own work deals with fundamental questions of shape, number, structure, and space, and what these notions mean and how they behave. It is perhaps surprising, and invisible, to the public that our students go on to dominate many aspects of the world, and our way of thinking forms the backbone of many important developments.

Q: Could you tell us about the research that won you the award?

A: Like most of us, when I was small, I would doodle and marvel at the patterns produced, and wonder why they appeared. As I grew older, I saw repeatedly beautiful puzzles and problems and saw them as disconnected and frivolous, but fun. Now I have had repeated epiphanies that have made me see that many of these ideas are related to each other. I understand more and more that everything is connected, and that the kind of thinking we do at the frontiers of mathematics is in some essential way the same kind of thinking children do when they are at serious play.

Q: What does being a member of SIAM mean to you?

A: While my research has happened to be on the pure side of mathematics, I am a mathematician more broadly, and I see the attempt to cut mathematics into "pure" and "applied" as misguided, ahistorical, and dangerous to both sides; perhaps an aberration centered in the late twentieth century. Speaking at SIAM conferences and events has brought me in contact with new ideas and new people, and people ask me interesting new questions. Membership in SIAM brought me into accidental contact with areas of mathematics with surprising connections to what I do, and this is part of the real value of professional societies.

Know someone who would be a great Porter Lecturer? The AMS collects recommendations year-round - suggest a speaker.