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Leonard Eisenbud Prize for Mathematics and Physics

This prize was established in 2006 in memory of the mathematical physicist, Leonard Eisenbud (1913-2004),  by his son and daughter-in-law, David and Monika Eisenbud.  Leonard Eisenbud was a student of Eugene Wigner.  He was particularly known for the book, Nuclear Structure (1958), which he co-authored with Wigner.  A friend of Paul Erdõs, he once threatened to write a dictionary of “English to Erdõs and Erdõs to English.”  He was one of the founders of the Physics Department at SUNY Stony Brook, where he taught from 1957 until his retirement in 1983.  In later years he became interested in the foundations of quantum mechanics and in the interaction of physics with culture and politics, teaching courses on the anti-science movement.  His son, David, was President of the American Mathematical Society 2003-2004.

The prize will honor a work or group of works that brings the two fields closer together.  Thus, for example, the prize might be given for a contribution to mathematics inspired by modern developments in physics or for the development of a physical theory exploiting modern mathematics in a novel way. 

The US$5,000 prize will be awarded every three years for a work published in the preceding six years.

Next award:  January 2011.

First award, 2008:  To Hirosi Ooguri, Andrew Strominger, and Cumrun Vafa for their paper "Black hole attractors and the topological string", Physical Review D (3) 70 (2004), 106007.