2025 Daniela Witten – Selective Inference for Real World Problems
2024 Trachette Jackson – Mobilizing Mathematics for the Fight Against Cancer
2023 Edray Goins – Distance Makes the Math Grow Deeper: Rational Distance Sets, Nate Dean, and Me
2021 Florian Luca – Arithmetic and Digits
2020 – MathFest canceled
2019 Alice Silverberg – Alice in Numberland – Adventures in Cryptography, Number Theory, and Life
2018 Peter Winkler – The Singular Uniformity of Large Random Systems
2017 Ingrid Daubechies – Bones and Teeth – Analyzing Shapes for Evolutionary Biology
2016 Robin Wilson – Combinatorics – The Math That Counts
2015 Noam Elkies – G-Sharp, A-Flat, and the Euclidean Algorithm
2014 Keith Devlin – Fibonacci and the First Personal Computing Revolution
2013 Gilbert Strang – Matrices I Admire
2012 Melanie Wood – The Chemistry of Primes
2011 Margaret Wright – You Can’t Top This: Making Things Better with Mathematics
2010 Nathaniel Dean – Incomprehensibility
2009 Persi Diaconis – The Mathematics of Perfect Shuffles
2008 John Conway – The Symmetries of Things
2007 Donald E. Knuth – NegaFibonacci Numbers and the Hyperbolic Plane
2006 Donald G. Saari – Ellipses and Circles? To Understand Voting Problems??!
2005 Arthur Benjamin – Proofs That Really Count: The Art of Combinatorial Proof
2004 Joan P. Hutchinson – When Five Colors Suffice
2003 Robert L. Devaney – Chaos Games and Fractal Images
2002 Frank Morgan – Soap Bubbles: Open Problems
2001 Thomas Banchoff – Twice as Old, Again, and Other Found Problems
2000 John Ewing – The Mathematics of Computers
1999 V. Frederick Rickey – The Creation of the Calculus: Who, What, When, Where, Why
1998 Joseph A. Gallian – Breaking Driver’s License Plate Codes
1997 Philip D. Straffin Jr. – Excursions in the Geometry of Voting
1996 J. Kevin Colligan – Webs, Sieves and Money
1995 Marjorie Senechal – Tilings as Differential Gratings
1994 Colin Adams – Cheating your way to the Knot Merit Badge
1993 George Andrews – Ramanujan for Students
1992 Underwood Dudley – Angle Trisectors
1991 Henry Pollack – Some Mathematics of Baseball
1990 Ronald L. Graham – Combinatorics and Computers
1989 Jane Cronin Scanlon – Entrainment of Frequency
1988 Doris Schattschneider – You, Too, Can Tile the Conway Way
1987 Clayton W. Dodge – Reflections of a Problems Editor
1986 Paul Halmos – Problems I Cannot Solve
1985 Ernst Snapper – The Philosophy of Mathematics
1984 John L. Kelley – The Concept of Plane Area
1983 Henry Alder – How to Discover and Prove Theorems
1982 Israel Halperin – The Changing Face of Mathematics
1981 E. P. Miles Jr. – The Beauties of Mathematics
1980 Richard P. Askey – Ramanujan and Some Extensions of the Gamma and Beta Functions
1979 H. Jerome Kiesler – Infinitesimals: Where They Come From and What They Can Do
1978 Herbert E. Robbins – The Statistics of Incidents and Accidents
1977 Ivan Niven – Techniques of Solving Extremal Problems
1976 H. S. MacDonald Coxeter – The Pappus Configuration and Its Groups
1975 J. Sutherland Frame – Matrix Functions: A Powerful Tool