Richard Stanley

Bio

Richard Stanley is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, MIT, since January 2018. He received the B.S. in mathematics from Caltech in 1966, and the Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1971, under the direction of Gian-Carlo Rota. His postdoctoral experience included appointment as a CLE Moore instructor, 1970-71, and Miller Research fellow, U.C. Berkeley, 1971-73. He subsequently joined the MIT faculty in applied mathematics in 1973, professor in 1979. Professor Stanley's research concerns problems in algebraic combinatorics. He served as Chair of the Applied Mathematics Committee, 1993-96, and Chair of the Undergraduate Committee, 1999-2000. Professor Stanley's distinctions include the SIAM George Pólya Prize in applied combinatorics, 1975, a Guggenheim fellowship, 1983, the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition, 2001, the Rolf Schock Prize in Mathematics, 2003, and the Aisenstadt Chair, University of Montreal, 2007. Stanley was the inaugural holder of the Department's Levinson Professorship Chair of Mathmatics, 2000-2010. He was appointed Senior Scholar at the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2004, and received the Honorary Doctor from the University of Waterloo. In 2007, he received an Honorary Professorship from Nankai University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1988) and Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1995).

In 2022, Stanley was awarded his second Steele Prize of the AMS, the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement. He was cited for revolutionizing enumerative combinatorics, "revealing deep connections with other branches of mathematics, such as commutative algebra, topology, algebraic geometry, probability, convex geometry, and representation theory."