The Coxeter-James Prize was inaugurated to recognize young mathematicians who have made outstanding contributions to mathematical research. The first award was presented in 1978.

H.S.M. (Donald) Coxeter (Seventh President of the CMS 1965-1967)

Donald Coxeter was born in Kensington (London), February 9, 1907. His parents were Lucy Gee (who painted portraits and landscapes) and Harold Samuel Coxeter (a manufacturer of surgical instruments and anaesthetics, with singing and sculpture as hobbies). He attended Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1926 until 1936, first as a scholar then as a fellow. He studied for his Ph.D. under H.F. Baker and then spent two separate years at Princeton, attending lectures by Weblen, Alexander, Lefschetz, Wedderburn, Eisenhart and Weyl. His first visit to Canada was in 1934, when Gilbert de B. Robinson urged Samuel Beatty to invite him from Princeton to Toronto as a colloquium speaker. Apparently Beatty was sufficiently impressed to send a telegraphic message in 1936 offering Coxeter an assistant professorship. That came just before his marriage to Rien Brouwer, a lovely young lady from The Hague. They travelled by ship to settle in Toronto.

During the next fifty years, they crossed the Atlantic Ocean twenty-six times, the first three by ship. Those trips included visiting professorships at Amsterdam, Edinburgh, East Anglia, Canberra, Sussex, Utrecht and Bologna. He was awarded honorary degrees by the universities of Alberta, Waterloo, Acadia, Trent, Toronto, Giessen (Germany), Carleton, McMaster and York. Other honors that he has received include Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1948), Fellow of the Royal Society (1950), honorary membership in several mathematical societies, Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1990) and, in 1997, Companion of the Order of Canada.

His own students for Ph.D. were J.M. Kingston (Special abstract groups), G.P. Henderson (Curves in Euclidean 4-space), Gerald Berman (Finite projective geometries), Lloyd Dulmage (Continuity and angle sum in hyperbolic geometry), Seymour Schuster (Pencils of polarities in projective space), W.O. J. Moser (Abstract groups and geometrical configurations), F.A. Sherk (Regular maps), D.W. Crowe (Groups generated by unitary reflections), B.L. Chilton (Symmetrical polytopes in 3 and 4 dimensions), W.G. Brown (The enumeration of maps), C..W.L. Garner (Polyhedra and honeycombs in hyperbolic space), N.W. Johnson (Uniform polytopes and honeycombs), J.B. Wilker (Almost perfect packings), J.G. Sunday (Regular polytopes in affine spaces), B.R. Monson (Simplicial forms), and Asia Ivic Weiss (Polytopes, honeycombs, groups and graphs).

Donald Coxeter died in 2003.

Ralph Duncan James (Fifth President of the CMS 1961-1963)

Ralph James was born in Liverpool, England, in 1909 and came to Vancouver at a young age. He graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1928 with first class honors in Mathematics, and took a master's degree under Frederick S. Nowlan. Nowlan persuaded and helped him to go to Chicago for a Ph.D. which he completed in 1932 under Leonard Eugene Dickson; his thesis was on Waring's Problem.

Awarded an NRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, he spent a year at Cal Tech with E.T. Bell and a second year at Cambridge with G. H. Hardy. His teaching career began at University of California at Berkeley, where he remained for five years. He returned to Canada in 1939 as Head of the Mathematics Department at the University of Saskatchewan.

In 1943, Ralph was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and accepted a professorship at the University of British Columbia. He continued to work in the theory of numbers, with a special interest in the Goldbach Problem. He also became interested in Perron type integrals, and developed a generalized integral just before Zygmund did. He assumed the Headship of the University of British Columbia Mathematics Department in 1948, a position he held for twenty-five years. During that period the Department grew to more than seventy members.

A member of the Canadian Mathematical Society (formerly Congress) virtually from its beginning, Ralph was one of its most ardent supporters. In his two years as President, he spent a good deal of time traveling to keep in touch with the constituent universities and colleges. He served on the Editorial Boards of the Canadian and Pacific Journals of Mathematics for many years. He was Editor-in-Chief of the American Mathematical Monthly from 1957 to 1961 and served twice on the Council of the American Mathematical Society.

During the fifties, he turned his attention to the teaching of Mathematics in schools. He helped found the British Columbia Association of Mathematics Teachers and played a significant role in provincial school curriculum development. He took pride in the fact that the B.C. Teachers' Federation made him an honorary member and the B.C.A.M.T. their Honorary President.

In the sixties, he encouraged his colleagues to take a serious interest in applying their work, particularly to the Biological and Social Sciences. He felt that there was too little dialogue between mathematicians in the Mathematics Department and those who use mathematics in other areas of the university. This concern led to the formation of an Institute of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at the University of British Columbia.

In the classroom, he was a dedicated teacher, aiming at stimulating an interest in mathematics and encouraging students to think and work things out for themselves. In debate he was articulate, forceful and, when necessary, an aggressive proponent of his views and principles.

Ralph James retired in 1974 and died in 1979.