Congratulations, Yahya Bashandy, and Nicholas Belz, winners of our Mathematics Awards for 2024 ! We applaud their accomplishments in the major. We are honored to celebrate their hard work and to be able to present them each with this year’s J.W.T. Youngs Memorial Undergraduate Award in Mathematics. We wish them all success in their future endeavors !
What is the Youngs Award ? The family and friends of Professor J.W.T. Youngs established the award to honor his memory after he tragically passed away in 1970. Youngs was a member of the Mathematics Department and a Fellow of Cowell College. So an endowment was established to support two annual prizes, one for an outstanding student of Mathematics enrolled in Cowell College, and one for an outstanding student of Mathematics at any UCSC college. The Youngs Award is intended to encourage and sustain awareness of the beauty of mathematics by recognizing those who, as Youngs did, “reveal the grace inherent in the discipline, independent of its application to other fields”; “the excitement and elegance possible in mathematics”.