RMC Professor Adrian Rice (Mathematics) was recently announced as the winner of the Catherine Richards Prize by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA).  

The Catherine Richards Prize is awarded for the best feature article in the IMA’s publication Mathematics Today each year. The winners are typically invited to receive their certificates at the IMA Presidential Address or Summer Lecture. Rice was recognized for his article “Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920): The Centenary of a Remarkable Mathematician,” published in April 2020. 

Previous Honors

This award represents the fifth time that Rice has received a prize for one of his published articles. In 2007, he received the Trevor Evans Award for Outstanding Expository Writing from the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) for an article he co-wrote with RMC Mathematics Professor Eve Torrence on the mathematics of Lewis Carroll. He also received the Trevor Evans Award for an article entitled “Gaussian Guesswork (or Why 1.19814023473559220744…is Such a Beautiful Number)” in 2010. In 2013, he won the MAA’s Carl B. Allendoerfer Award for the paper “Why Ellipses are not Elliptic Curves,” which he co-authored with Professor Ezra Brown of Virginia Tech. And in 2019, he was awarded the Paul R. Halmos–Lester R. Ford Award for his paper “Partnership, Partition, and Proof: The Path to the Hardy–Ramanujan Partition Formula.”

Adrian Rice

Rice is the Dorothy and Muscoe Garnett Professor of Mathematics and chair of RMC’s Department of Mathematics. He earned his B.S. in mathematics from University College London and his Ph.D. in the history of mathematics from Middlesex University, and joined the faculty at RMC in 1999. His research focuses on 19th-century and early 20th-century mathematics.  

His publications include Mathematics Unbound: The Evolution of an International Mathematical Research Community, 1800–1945 (edited with Karen Hunger Parshall), The London Mathematical Society Book of Presidents, 1865–1965 (written with Susan Oakes and Alan Pears), and Mathematics in Victorian Britain (edited with Raymond Flood and Robin Wilson). His most recent book is Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist, co-authored with Dr. Christopher Hollings and Professor Ursula Martin of the University of Oxford.

Rice is a two-time recipient of RMC’s Thomas Branch Award for Excellence in Teaching (2003 and 2014), and he was also awarded the MAA’s John Smith Award for Distinctive College or University Teaching in 2013. He was elected a corresponding member of the Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences in 2019.