Prix G. de B. Robinson

Le prix G. de B. Robinson rend hommage aux mathématiciens qui se sont distingués par l'excellence de leurs articles parus dans le Journal canadien de mathématiques et le Bulletin canadien de mathématiques, et vise à encourager la présentation d'articles de première qualité pour ces revues. Il a été décerné pour la première fois pour des articles qui sont apparus dans le Journal canadien de mathématiques en 1994-1995.

Lauréats

• Prix 2009 : Vladimir Manuilov & Klaus Thomsen
• Prix 2008 : Dmitry Jakobson, Nikolai Nadirashvili & Iosif Polterovich
• Prix 2007 : Ronald van Luijk
• Tous les lauréats

Selection:

The Selection Jury consists of the Associate Editors of the CJM and CMB. A member of the CMS Publications Committee shall be appointed as the non-voting Chair of the Jury.

There shall be up to three awards per year with some variation possible at the discretion of the Selection Jury.

In even years, the last two complete volumes of the CJM will be under consideration and, in odd years, the last two complete volumes of the CMB. The Editors-in-Chief for the journal under consideration, nominate papers from the respective two volumes. The Chair of the Jury invites individual members of the Jury to nominate additional papers. The Chair asks the members of the Jury to consider all nominated papers. After due time for deliberation, the Chair collects the votes from the Jury.

Each juror has 100 votes to allocate among those papers being nominated. The Chair of the Jury adds the votes and makes the results known to the Jury and to the Chair of the CMS Publications Committee.

The jurors exercise their own mathematical judgement in distributing their votes. Some of the characteristics which they may consider are; clarity, elegance, conciseness, depth and difficulty, and potential impact. The jurors are not responsible for establishing the correctness or originality of the results.

The decision as to what papers will receive a G. de B. Robinson Award is made no later than June 30 in the year following the appearance of the final issue of the two volumes being considered.

Biographical Information:

Born in Toronto in 1906 Gilbert Robinson graduated from the University of Toronto in 1927 and went to Cambridge where he received his Ph.D. in 1931 with the group theorist Alfred Young. He then joined the Mathematics Department in Toronto where he served until his retirement in 1971, except for a period of wartime service in Ottawa.

Gilbert Robinson specialized in the study of the symmetric groups on which he became a recognized authority, writing some forty papers on the topic. He also wrote The Foundations of Geometry (1940) and The Representations of the Symmetric Groups (1961) as well as a text on vector geometry. His last mathematical book was his edition of the collected papers of Alfred Young (1977), and he later wrote short volumes on departmental, local, and family history.

While in Ottawa, Gilbert was one of the founding lecturers of Carleton University, and was also elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1944. His wartime work on codes and cyphers, secret for many years, has now been described in a recently published volume Best Kept Secret by Bryden. He became director of the ‘Examination Unit' which conducted decoding work during the war and he played a role in establishing the decoding section which gave Canada some influence in this domain postwar. Gilbert's wartime services were recognized by the award of the M.B.E.

Returning to the Toronto department Gilbert was present at the founding conference of the Canadian Mathematical Congress in 1945, and with H.S.M. Coxeter he established the Canadian Journal of Mathematics which began publishing in 1949. He continued as the Managing Editor for thirty years.

Gilbert undertook many professional and administrative responsibilities throughout his career, including the presidencies of the science section of the Royal Society, of the University of Toronto Settlement (a charitable foundation), the Faculty Club, the Society for the History and Philisophy of Mathematics, as Chairman of the NRC Associate Committee in Mathematics, and as the first Vice-President for Research Administration at the University of Toronto, in 1965-71. For these and other community services he received several medals and other awards from the federal and provincial governments.

These activities and personal hobbies of photography, cabinet making and local history did not keep Gilbert from working at his mathematics, for he continued to publish papers throughout his career. In retirement, he founded the Mathematical Reports of the Academy of Science, of which he was production editor until 1990. Only an increasing weight of years brought about his gradual withdrawal from an active and many-sided career.

Gilbert Robinson died in Toronto in 1992.