Call open for the 2027 Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer Prize

Each year, a foundation in Barcelona offers 15,000 euros for a mathematics book that hasn’t been published yet. The Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer Foundation has opened the call for its 2027 prize, and authors have until 27 November to send in their manuscripts. Besides the money, the winning book is published by Birkhäuser in its Progress in Mathematics series.

The prize asks for a particular kind of book, the sort a doctoral student keeps open on the desk for a whole term. The rules describe it as an expository monograph on recent developments in an active area of research, written by someone who has made significant contributions to that area. It has to be original and unpublished, with no prior copyright agreement attached, at least 150 pages long and written in English, although manuscripts in other languages may be considered in exceptional cases.

Co-authored books are welcome, and the prize is then split equally among the authors. Authors who won the prize between 2017 and 2026 aren’t eligible. Manuscripts are submitted as a PDF through an online form; the source file isn’t needed, though the Foundation prefers LaTeX. The deadline is 13:00 (GMT+1) on 27 November 2026, and the winner will be announced in Barcelona in April 2027.

The winning monograph is proposed by a scientific committee, made up this time of Ruth Kellerhals (Université de Fribourg), Jiang-Hua Lu (University of Hong Kong), Marta Sanz-Solé (Universitat de Barcelona), Kristian Seip (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and Yuri Tschinkel (Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University).

The Foundation was created in 1983 by Maria and Maria dels Àngels Carbona i Balaguer, cousins of the mathematician whose name it carries. It joined the Institut d’Estudis Catalans in 1991, and the director of the CRM sits on its board of trustees.

Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer was born in Figueres in 1912 with a near-total physical disability, and spent his life in a wheelchair he couldn’t move on his own. His doctor thought school and teachers would be too much strain, so he learned at home, alone or from his mother, Àngela Balaguer, reading his way through astronomy and physics before mathematics took over. In 1938 he sent his first results to Jacques Hadamard in Paris, who had one of his papers published in the Comptes rendus of the Académie des sciences and encouraged him to keep going. From then on he was in constant contact with the French school of analysis, above all with Szolem Mandelbrojt and his students. Not one of his papers was written in his own hand. He dictated them to his mother until her death in 1955 and then, after a period of grief, to his cousins.

Official recognition came slowly, and in a strange order. By the time he earned his secondary-school diploma, several academies had already given him prizes. From 1948 he was on the payroll of the Barcelona Mathematical Seminar as a “temporary collaborator”, and he only became a full member in 1962, although for years he had in practice been running it. His appointment as a research scientist at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) was confirmed on 9 December 1967. He died eighteen days later, still at work.