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The University of Cambridge has announced the winners of one of its oldest and most prestigious prizes.

The Adams Prize is awarded jointly each year by the Faculty of Mathematics and St John’s College to UK-based researchers, under the age of 40, doing first class international research in the Mathematical Sciences.

This year’s topic was “Statistical Analysis of Big Data”, and the prize has been awarded jointly to Professor Graham Cormode (University of Warwick) and Professor Richard Samworth (University of Cambridge).

Professor Raymond E. Goldstein FRS, Chairman of the Adams Prize Adjudicators, said:

“Professor Cormode is a computer scientist who has made seminal contributions to algorithms used in the management and analysis of massive data sets, including the celebrated and widely used `count-min sketch'.  Professor Samworth has made ground breaking contributions in the areas of nonparametric estimation under qualitative constraints, random projections in feature space, and high-dimensional statistics.  On behalf of the Adams Prize Committee, I would like to congratulate both of them on winning the Prize this year.”

The Adams Prize is named after the mathematician John Couch Adams and was endowed by members of St John’s College. It is currently worth approximately £15,000. It commemorates Adams’s role in the discovery of the planet Neptune, through calculation of the discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus.

For further information, please contact:

  1. Undergraduate Office, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Cambridge.
    Tel: 01223 337968; e-mail: adamsprize@maths.cam.ac.uk
  2. Office of External Affairs and Communications, University of Cambridge.
    Tel: 01223 332300; e-mail: communications@admin.cam.ac.uk