Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics
The Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics, also called the Satter Prize, is one of twenty-one prizes given out by the American Mathematical Society. It is presented biennially in recognition of an outstanding contribution to mathematics research by a woman in the previous six years. The award was established in 1990 using a donation from Joan Birman, in memory of her sister, Ruth Lyttle Satter, who worked primarily in biological sciences, and was a proponent for equal opportunities for women in science. First awarded in 1991, the award is intended to "honor commitment to research and to encourage women in science". The winner is selected by the council of the AMS, based on the recommendation of a selection committee. The prize is awarded at the Joint Mathematics Meetings during odd numbered years, and has always carried a modest cash reward. Since 2003, the prize has been $5,000, while from 1997 to 2001, the prize came with $1,200, and prior to that it was $4,000. If a joint award is made, the prize money is split between the recipients.
, the award has been given 15 times, to 16 different individuals. Dusa McDuff was the first recipient of the award, for her work on symplectic geometry. A joint award was made for the only time in 2001, when Karen E. Smith and Sijue Wu shared the award. The 2013 prize winner was Maryam Mirzakhani, who, in 2014, was the first woman to be awarded the Fields Medal. This is considered to be the highest honor a mathematician can receive. She won both awards for her work on "the geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces". The most recent winner is Maryna Viazovska, who was awarded the prize in 2019 for her "groundbreaking work in discrete geometry and her spectacular solution to the sphere-packing problem in dimension eight".
The Association for Women in Science have a similarly titled award, the Ruth Satter Memorial Award, which is a cash prize of $1,000 for "an outstanding graduate student who interrupted her education for at least 3 years to raise a family".
Recipients
| Year | Image | Recipient | Rationale |
| 1991 | "for her outstanding work during the past five years on symplectic geometry" | ||
| 1993 | "for her leading role in the investigation of the statistical properties of dynamical systems" | ||
| 1995 | "for her deep contributions to the study of partial differential equations on Riemannian manifolds and in particular for her work on extremal problems in spectral geometry and the compactness of isospectral metrics within a fixed conformal class on a compact 3-manifold" | ||
| 1997 | "for her deep and beautiful analysis of wavelets and their applications" | ||
| 1999 | "for her number theoretical research on p-adic L-functions and Iwasawa theory" | ||
| 2001 | "for her outstanding work in commutative algebra" | ||
| 2001 | "for her work on a long-standing problem in the water wave equation" | ||
| 2003 | "for her outstanding work in 3-dimensional topology" | ||
| 2005 | "for her pioneering work on non-perturbative quasiperiodic localization, in particular for results in her papers Metal–insulator transition for the almost Mathieu operator, Ann. of Math. 150, no. 3, 1159–1175, and with J. Bourgain, Absolutely continuous spectrum for 1D quasiperiodic operators, Invent. Math. 148, no. 3, 453–463" | ||
| 2007 | "for her deep contributions to algebraic geometry, and in particular for her recent solutions to two long-standing open problems: the Kodaira problem and Green's conjecture, no. 5, 1163–1190; and Green's generic syzygy conjecture for curves of even genus lying on a K3 surface, Journal of the European Mathematical Society, 4 " | ||
| 2009 | "for her fundamental work on the hydrodynamic limits of the Boltzmann equation in the kinetic theory of gases" | ||
| 2011 | "for her remarkable contributions to the field of ergodic theory of partially hyperbolic dynamical systems" | ||
| 2013 | "for her deep contributions to the theory of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces" | ||
| 2015 | "for her fundamental contributions to the fields of dynamics on homogeneous spaces, discrete subgroups of Lie groups, and applications to number theory" | ||
| 2017 | "for her fundamental contributions to complex dynamics, potential theory, and the emerging field of arithmetic dynamics" | ||
| 2019 | "for her groundbreaking work in discrete geometry and her spectacular solution to the sphere-packing problem in dimension eight. |