Jewish Recipients of the Bocher Memorial Prize

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Listed below are recipients of the Bôcher Memorial Prize in Mathematics who were, or are, Jewish. The Bôcher Prize is considered to be one of the five most prestigious in the field of mathematics.¹

Solomon Lefschetz (1924)
Norbert Wiener (1933)
John von Neumann (1938)
Jesse Douglas² (1943)
Norman Levinson (1953)
Louis Nirenberg (1959)
Paul Cohen (1964)
I. M. Singer (1969)
Donald Ornstein (1974)
Leon Simon (1994)
Sergiu Klainerman (1999)
Charles Fefferman (2008)
Carlos Kenig (2008)

NOTES
1. See the entry entitled "Mathematical Prizes" on p. 1863 of the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics (2nd Edition), by Eric W. Weisstein (Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, FL, 2003).
2. According to the obituary notice for Jesse Douglas published in the October 8, 1965 edition of The New York Herald Tribune, he died at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan and his funeral was held the following day at the "The Riverside" (the largest exclusively Jewish funeral chapel in New York City). Douglas, who was the first recipient of a Fields Medal, was born in New York City and educated at the City College of New York and at Columbia University. His entry in the 1964-1965 edition of Marquis Who's Who in America indicates that his mother's maiden name was Sarah Kommel. The name "Kommel" is most frequently found among Jews originating in the Pale of Settlement; see A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire, by Alexander Beider (Avotaynu, Inc., Teaneck NJ, 1993, p. 326). Both parents were, in fact, Jewish immigrants from Russia. The death notice lists a brother, Dr. Harold Douglas, and a sister, Pearl Schweizer, among his survivors. Dr. Harold Douglas maintained medical offices at Beth Israel Medical Center in lower Manhattan.

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