Allen Hatcher, emeritus professor of mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded the inaugural Elias M. Stein Prize for Transformative Exposition by the American Mathematical Society. The $5,000 prize will be presented at the 2025 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Seattle.
Hatcher, a geometric topologist, will receive the award for his book, “Algebraic Topology,” published in 2002 by Cambridge University Press.
“Allen Hatcher’s ‘Algebraic Topology’ has transformed the teaching of this topic with its lively mix of intuition, salient examples, and formal mathematics,” according to the prize citation. “Its careful approach and spirit of fun has attracted many newcomers to the field.”
The textbook is “a global classic…the source from which the majority of students worldwide have learned the subject in the last 25 years,” said Martin Bridson M.A. ’89, Ph.D. ’91, the Whitehead Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford and the president of the Clay Mathematics Institute.
In addition to the impact of his textbook, Hatcher has also made significant contributions to both algebraic topology and geometric topology, an unusual breadth of expertise among mathematicians. A common thread through much of Hatcher’s research is the idea of studying the space of all topological objects of a certain kind, for example, the space of all finite polyhedra, the space of all diffeomorphisms of a manifold, or the space of all knots.
After receiving a B.A. in mathematics and a B.Mus. in music from Oberlin College in 1966, Hatcher went to Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1971. He held positions at Princeton and UCLA before coming to Cornell in 1983. He retired in 2015.
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