 In 1962 Milnor was awarded the Fields Medal for his work in differential topology.He later went on to win the National Medal of Science (1967), the Lester R. Ford Award in 1970 and again in 1984, the Leroy P. Steele Prize for "Seminal Contribution to Research" (1982), the Wolf Prize in Mathematics (1989), the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition (2004), and the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2011) "... for a paper of fundamental and lasting importance, On manifolds homeomorphic to the 7-sphere, Annals of Mathematics 64 (1956), 399–405".In 1991 a symposium was held at Stony Brook University in celebration of his 60th birthday.