Randolph-Macon College Mathematics Professor Adrian Rice was recently presented with the Paul R. Halmos – Lester R. Ford Award by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) at their annual MathFest summer meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio. The award, established in 1964, is given to authors of outstanding papers published in the MAA’s premier journal, The American Mathematical Monthly. Rice was recognized for his paper “Partnership, Partition, and Proof: The Path to the Hardy–Ramanujan Partition Formula,” which was published in 2018.

At the awards ceremony, a citation was read in praise of his article: “The Hardy-Ramanujan partition formula remains one of the most stunning triumphs in the theory of numbers. … This beautiful article celebrates the centennial of the partition formula, taking the reader on a tour through its historical development. … Adrian Rice chronicles the story in stages, portraying the famed result not as a singular event, but rather as the culmination of a sequence of refinements and improvements pioneered by the rigorous G. H. Hardy and the enigmatic Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan.”

This award represents the fourth time that Rice has won a prize for an article he has published in an MAA journal. In 2007, he received the MAA’s Trevor Evans Award for Outstanding Expository Writing 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. And 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.

Adrian Rice
Rice, who joined the faculty at RMC in 1999, earned his B.S. in mathematics from University College London and his Ph.D. in the history of mathematics from Middlesex University. 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.