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See also the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Society

The Adams Prize is awarded each year by the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and St John's College to a young, UK based mathematician for first-class international research in the Mathematical Sciences.

The Prize is named after the mathematician John Couch Adams and was endowed by members of St John's College. It was approved by the senate of the university in 1848, to commemorate Adam's discovery of the planet Neptune. Originally open only to Cambridge graduates the current stipulation is that the mathematician must be resident in the UK, and under 40 years of age. Each year applications are invited from mathematicians who have worked in a specific area of mathematics. As of 2004 it is worth £15,000, and the prize is awarded in three parts. The first third is paid directly to the candidate, another third to the candidate's institution to fund research expenses, and the final third is paid on publication of a survey paper in the winner's field in a major mathematics journal.

The prize has been awarded to many well known mathematicians including James Clerk Maxwell and Sir William Hodge. However the first female mathematician to win the prize was only in 2002 when it was awarded to Susan Howson a lecturer at the University of Nottingham for her work on number theory and elliptic curves.

There does not currently seem to be an official list of prize winners, and the following partial list is compiled from internet sources:

• 1850 Robert Peirson
• 1857 James Clerk Maxwell
• 1865 Edward Walker
• 1882 Joseph John Thomson
• 1871 Isaac Todhunter
• 1877 Edward John Routh
• 1883 Joseph John Thomson
• 1893 John Henry Poynting
• 1899 Joseph Larmor, Gilbert Thomas Walker (shared)
• 1901 Hector Munro MacDonald
• 1907 Ernest William Brown
• 1909 George Adolphus Schott
• 1911 Augustus Edward Hough Love
• 1913 Samuel Bruce McClaren, John William Nicholson (shared)
• 1915 Geoffrey Ingram Taylor
• 1917 Sir James Hopwood Jeans
• 1919 John William Nicholson
• 1922 Joseph Proudman
• 1924 Ralph Howard Fowler|Sir Ralph Fowler
• 1926 Sir Harold Jeffreys
• 1928 Sydney Chapman
• 1930 Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch
• 1932 Alan Herries Wilson
• 1934 Sidney Goldstein
• 1936 Sir William Hodge
• 1940 Harold Davenport
• 1942 Hormasji Jehangir Bhabha
• 1947-8 John Charles Burkill, Subrahmanyan Chandresekhar, Walter Kurt Hayman, John MacNaughton Whittaker (shared)
• 1947 Desmond Sawyer (approx)
• 1949-50 George Keith Batchelor, William Reginald Dean, Leslie Howarth (shared)]]
• 1952 Bernhard Hermann Neumann
• 1955 Harold Gordon Eggleston
• 1958 Paul Taunton Matthews, Abdus Salam, John Gerald Taylor (shared)
• 1960 Vasant Shankar Huzurbazar, Walter Laws Smith (shared)
• 1962 John Robert Ringrose
• 1964 James Gardner Oldroyd, Owen Larkin Phillips (shared)
• 1966 Stephen Hawking, Jayant Vishnu Narlikar (shared)
• 1966 Roger Penrose
• 1967 Jayant Vishnu Narlikar
• 1971 Robert Burridge, Leslie John Walpole, John Raymond Willis (shared)
• 1972 Alan Baker
• 1973 Christopher Hooley
• 1975 J.P. Fitch
• 1981 Michael E. McIntyre
• 1983 Martin J Taylor (shared)
• 1983 Aidan Schofield (shared)
• 1987 Brian D Ripley
• 1992 Paul A Glendinning
• 2000 Sandu Popescu [1]
• 2001 Susan Howson
• 2002 David Hobson
• 2003 Dominic Joyce
• 2004 Mihalis Dafermos and David Stuart
• 2005 Jonathan Sherratt [2]
• 2006 Paul Fearnhead