The Gavin Brown Prize was established in 2011 for “an outstanding single article, monograph or book consisting of original research in Pure Mathematics, and published in the 6 calendar years preceding the year of the award”. In 2012 it will be for a publication in Applied Mathematics and in 2013 for one in Statistics. Thereafter the prize will rotate between these three areas in a 3-year cycle.

The Gavin Brown Prize will awarded annually at the annual meeting of the AustMS.
Find out more here about background and rules of the Prize.

Gavin Brown Prize winners to date are:

• 2011 — Professor Neil Trudinger FAA, FRS, FAustMS and Professor Xu-Jia Wang FAA, FAustMS Xi-Nan Ma^* (ECNU), Neil S. Trudinger (ANU), Xu-Jia Wang (ANU)
  Regularity of Potential Functions of the Optimal Transportation Problem
  Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis, 177 (2005), no. 2, 151–183.
  
  The paper unlocked a problem mentioned in the Fields medallist Cedric Villani's 2003 AMS book on optimal transport as "the most important" remaining to be understood in the area of smoothness of optimal transport, namely the regularity in a geometric (Riemannian) setting. The problem seemed to be monstrously difficult and Caffarelli apparently thought it to be intractable. Then arrived Ma, Trudinger and Wang, and their discovery (by brute analytic force) of what is now called the "Ma–Trudinger–Wang tensor". The paper was like a lightning strike, and was the start of a new direction of research stimulating many papers and it was their contribution that made all this possible, a remarkable insight both in the theory of optimal transport and in differential geometry.
  ^*Xi-Nan Ma is not eligible to receive the Gavin Brown Prize, as he has not been a member of AustMS during the last 10 years.