Awards

Every year the NZMS hands out awards for mathematics research and contributions to mathematics in NZ.

Kalman Prize

The 2024 Kalman Prize for Best Paper went to Rod Downey

The Kalman Prize for Best Paper was instituted in 2016 to recognise excellence in research carried out by New Zealand mathematicians.
Rod Downey with NZMS president Melissa Tacy

The Prize will normally be awarded annually for an outstanding and innovative piece of research in the mathematical sciences published by a member or members of the NZMS. The Prize is for a single publication of original research, which may be an article, monograph or book, having appeared within the last 5 calendar years: 2020-2025. The value of the Prize is $5000. The Prize is generously funded by the Margaret and John Kalman Charitable Trust, and recognises the significant contributions to mathematics in New Zealand made by Professor John Kalman.

Eligibility. A publication may be nominated for the Prize by any member of the NZMS who is not an author of that publication. To be eligible, the nominated publication must have at least one author who:

i) is a current member of the NZMS, and was a member in the calendar year of publication of the nominated work; and
ii) is a resident of New Zealand, and used a New Zealand address in the publication.

In the case of publications with multiple eligible authors, the Prize will be shared by all eligible authors. The existence of authors who do not meet the conditions in i) and ii) above will not preclude the award, although the judging panel may take into account whether the NZ author has made a major contribution to the published work. The judging panel may deem a publication ineligible if an author has previously received an award from the NZMS for a body of research that included the nominated publication.

Nominations should include the following:

  • a brief summary from the nominator(s) of 1-2 pages of what makes the nominated publication important, innovative and outstanding (with appropriate references to prior or subsequent work in the field) as well as a confirmation that the author satisfies the eligibility requirements;
  • an electronic copy (pdf) of the publication;
  • the names of six possible assessors. The judging panel may approach assessors other than those nominated. Assessors must not have a conflict of interest (see below) and they should be able to give scientific insight into the work to be assessed. It may be easier to avoid a conflict of interest by choosing international assessors.

Unsuccessful applicants from 2024 (whose publication remains within the eligibility period) will be invited to update their application so that it can be reconsidered in 2025.

Nominations should be sent by email to the NZMS President,   Bernd Krauskopf  by 31 August 2025. Submissions should state clearly that they are for the Kalman Prize for Best Paper.

A judging panel will be appointed by the NZMS President, and makes recommendations to the President for the Prize. We note that the prize should be awarded solely on the merit of the publication, not on career achievements of the author or authors. The winner(s) of the prize will be announced at the New Zealand Mathematics Colloquium Dinner in December.

The Kalman Prize for Best Paper in 2024 was awarded to Rod Downey (Victoria University of Wellington) for the book `A Hierarchy of Turing Degrees’ (Annals of Mathematics Series), written jointly with Noam Greenberg (Victoria University of Wellington).

Recipients of the Kalman Prize
Year Name Location Award Details
2023 Marston Conder, Jin-Xin Zhou, Yan-Quan Feng and Mi-Mi Zhang Edge-transitive bi-Cayley graphs, Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B. 145 (2020), 264--306.
2022 C.M. Postlethwaite and A.M. Rucklidge. Stability of cycling behaviour near a heteroclinic network model of Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock. Nonlinearity, 35, 1702, 2022.
2021 Robert M. Guralnick, Martin W. Liebeck, E.A. O’Brien, Aner Shalev and Pham Huu Tiep. Surjective word maps and Burnside’s paqb theorem. Inventiones Mathematicae 213 (2018), 589–695.
2020 Melissa Tacy Lp estimates for joint quasimodes of semiclassical pseudo-differential operators. Israel Journal of Mathematics 232 (2019), 401–425.
2019 Alexander Melnikov and Keng Meng Ng. Computable torsion abelian groups. Advances in Mathematics 325 (2018), 864-907.
2018 Laurent Bienvenu, Noam Greenberg, Antonin Kucera, Andre Nies and Dan Turetsky. Coherent randomness tests and computing the K-trivial sets. J. European Math. Society 18 (2016), 773-812.
2017 Jonathan H. Brown, Lisa Orloff Clark, Cynthia Farthing and Aidan Sims. Simplicity of algebras associated to etale groupoids. Semigroup Forum 88 (2014), 433-452.
2016 Timothy H. Marshall and Gaven J. Martin. Minimal co-volume hyperbolic lattices II: Simple torsion in a Kleinian group. Annals of Mathematics 176 (2012), 261-301.