London Mathematical Society Awards Christopher Bishop 2024 Senior Berwick Prize

Stony Brook University Distinguished Professor of Mathematics Christopher Bishop was awarded the 2024 Senior Berwick Prize by the London Mathematical Society. Photo by John Griffin.

State University of New York Distinguished Professor Christopher Bishop has been awarded the 2024 Senior Berwick Prize by the London Mathematical Society (LMS).

Bishop, a professor in the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Mathematics, was awarded the Senior Berwick Prize for the pair of papers 'Models for the Eremenko-Lyubich Class,' published in the Journal of the London Mathematical Society in 2015, and 'Models for the Speiser Class,' published in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society in 2017. LMS announced its 2024 prize winners at the end of June.

The Berwick Prize and Senior Berwick Prize are two prizes of the LMS awarded in alternating years in memory of William Edward Hodgson Berwick. The prizes are awarded "in recognition of an outstanding piece of mathematical research … published by the Society" in the eight years before the year of the award.

The prize has been awarded for 40 years to numerous outstanding mathematicians, including Stony Brook emeritus professor Dusa McDuff in 2010, but also such mathematical luminaries as John G. Thompson, Louis Mordell, JHC Whitehead, Nigel Hitchen, William Hodge, Ian Agol, and many others.

"I was gratified and delighted to hear that I had been awarded the Senior Berwick prize by the London Mathematical Society," Bishop said. "This is a highly regarded award and the list of previous winners includes numerous mathematical luminaries, so to be included among such names is a tremendous honor that was quite unexpected, but much appreciated."

"Professor Bishop's groundbreaking work creating the technique of conformal folding and applying it to open questions in transcendental dynamical systems is an important milestone, opening new methods of investigation in this branch of mathematics," said Scott Sutherland, professor and chair in the Department of Mathematics. "It is a great pleasure to see the London Mathematical Society acknowledge its importance with this well-deserved prize."

Bishop is an internationally acclaimed mathematician and one of the leading experts in complex analysis, hyperbolic geometry and computational geometry. His work has been lauded by experts as "breakthrough" and "revolutionary," and in his three-decade career, he has solved challenging and significant problems, developed new concepts, and advanced the field of mathematics.

Bishop has more than 90 publications, including work published in the Annals of Mathematics, Inventiones Mathematicae and Acta Mathematica, considered the top journals in mathematics. He has been continually supported by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) graduate, postdoctoral and standard grants for over 30 years. He was awarded a Sloan Fellowship, was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018, and became a Fellow of the American Mathematics Society in 2019, when he was also named a Simons Fellow in Mathematics.

In the official prize citation, LMS said, "The papers constitute a breakthrough in the understanding of two fundamental classes of transcendental entire functions: the Speiser class S, consisting of those that act as a covering map over the complement of a finite set of 'singular values', and the related but larger Eremenko-Lyubich class B, where the set of singular values is merely required to be
bounded."

The citation continued: "Bishop's papers provide a 'black box' that is now the gold standard for constructing functions in the classes S and B and has been used extensively by other researchers since. His work represents an extraordinary step-change in our understanding of these two important classes and raises fascinating questions about their subtle differences."

The London Mathematical Society (LMS) was founded in 1865 and is one of the oldest such societies in the world; it was the model for the American Mathematical Society (AMS), founded in 1888. The LMS has become the main British mathematical society for the advancement, dissemination and promotion of mathematics in the UK and worldwide, and publishes some of the most prestigious journals in mathematics.

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