IMA–LMS CHRISTOPHER ZEEMAN MEDAL 2008

The Councils of the IMA and LMS have awarded the inaugural Christopher Zeeman Medal to Professor Ian Stewart, FRS, of the University of Warwick, in recognition of his wide-ranging and highly influential activities in promoting mathematics through books, radio, television and public lectures, thereby bringing the excitement and fascination of mathematics to a large number of people.

The Christopher Zeeman Medal was launched this year as a triennial award of the IMA and LMS to recognise and reward the contributions of mathematicians involved in promoting mathematics to the public, and to encourage others to work in this area by demonstrating that such activities are valued and are a part of a mathematician’s role and responsibilities. The Medal is to be presented by Sir Christopher at a joint meeting of the two societies in 2009.

Ian Stewart has been an outstanding communicator of mathematics for nearly 40 years, and has set the standards for all mathematics communicators to follow. Ian Stewart has made a huge contribution to the promotion of mathematics both through his individual work, in inspiring those who work with him, and in developing an extraordinary canon of output. He has inspired countless numbers of people both to have an interest in mathematics and to take up mathematics as a career.

He is a master of all media for communicating mathematics. He has written 14 popular mathematics books (translated into many different languages), all of which are masterpieces in combining clarity of expression, the means to communicate to a broad audience and also enough deep mathematics to satisfy and educate a professional mathematician. They include such notable works as Does God Play Dice?, Concepts in Modern Mathematics, The Problems of Mathematics, Nature’s Numbers, The Magical Maze, Letters to a Young Mathematician and Why Beauty is Truth. In all of these books he has never compromised in the level of mathematics that he has presented, and always manages to find a path to lead a general audience upwards so that they can appreciate the true power and beauty of modern mathematics. This was also evident in the many Mathematical Recreations columns that he wrote for the Scientific American and more recently in the Enigmas and Puzzles section of Prospect Magazine. He has also frequently appeared on both radio and television and has for many years been the major advocate of mathematics in the popular media. In 1997 he was the Royal Institution Christmas Lecturer (the second ever to present mathematics).

In addition to popular works he has written remarkably clear mathematics textbooks such as Galois Theory, Algebraic Number Theory and Catastrophe Theory and its Applications. He has also conducted leading-edge research into the field of bifurcations with symmetry (supervising many research students), co-authoring the major textbook in this field. This has led to 175 publications including seminal papers on animal gait. As well as his mathematical works, he has written successful science-fiction books and books on extraterrestrial biology which further show his ability to communicate scientific ideas to a vast audience.