He was honored by being selected to write the Carus Monograph Number 11, entitled Irrational Numbers.[3] He won a Lester R. Ford Award in 1970.[4] Niven numbers, Niven's constant, and Niven's theorem are named in his honor; also, in 2000, the asteroid 12513 Niven, discovered in 1998, was named after him. He has an Erdős number of 1 because he coauthored a paper with Paul Erdős [5] .