Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics
The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics is an annual award of the Breakthrough Prize series announced in 2013.
It is funded by Yuri Milner[1] and Mark Zuckerberg and others.[2] The annual award comes with a cash gift of $3 million. The Breakthrough Prize Board also selects up to three laureates for the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize which awards $100,000 to early-career researchers. Starting in 2021 (prizes announced in September 2020), the $50,000 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize is also awarded to a number of women mathematicians who have completed their PhDs within the past two years.
Motivation[]
The founders of the prize have stated that they want to help scientists to be perceived as celebrities again, and to reverse a 50-year "downward trend".[3] They hope that this may make "more young students [...] aspire to be scientists".[3]
Laureates[]
Year | Portrait | Laureate (birth/death) |
Country | Rationale | Affiliation |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
2015[4] | Simon Donaldson (b. 1957) |
United Kingdom | "for the new revolutionary invariants of 4-dimensional manifolds and for the study of the relation between stability in algebraic geometry and in global differential geometry, both for bundles and for Fano varieties."[5] | Stony Brook University Imperial College London | |
Maxim Kontsevich (b. 1964) |
Russia France |
"for work making a deep impact in a vast variety of mathematical disciplines, including algebraic geometry, deformation theory, symplectic topology, homological algebra and dynamical systems."[6] | Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques | ||
Jacob Lurie (b. 1977) |
United States | "for his work on the foundations of higher category theory and derived algebraic geometry; for the classification of fully extended topological quantum field theories; and for providing a moduli-theoretic interpretation of elliptic cohomology."[7] | Harvard University | ||
Terence Tao (b. 1975) |
Australia United States |
"for numerous breakthrough contributions to harmonic analysis, combinatorics, partial differential equations and analytic number theory."[8] | University of California, Los Angeles | ||
Richard Taylor (b. 1962) |
United Kingdom United States |
"for numerous breakthrough results in the theory of automorphic forms, including the Taniyama–Weil conjecture, the local Langlands conjecture for general linear groups, and the Sato–Tate conjecture."[9] | Institute for Advanced Study | ||
2016 | Ian Agol (b. 1970) |
United States | "for spectacular contributions to low dimensional topology and geometric group theory, including work on the solutions of the tameness, virtually Haken and virtual fibering conjectures."[10][11] | University of California, Berkeley Institute for Advanced Study | |
2017 | Jean Bourgain (1954–2018) |
Belgium | "for multiple transformative contributions to analysis, combinatorics, partial differential equations, high-dimensional geometry and number theory."[12] | Institute for Advanced Study | |
2018 | Christopher Hacon (b. 1970) |
United Kingdom United States |
"for transformational contributions to birational algebraic geometry, especially to the minimal model program in all dimensions."[13][14] | University of Utah | |
James McKernan (b. 1964) |
United Kingdom United Kingdom |
University of California, San Diego | |||
2019 | Vincent Lafforgue (b. 1974) |
France | "for ground breaking contributions to several areas of mathematics, in particular to the Langlands program in the function field case."[15] | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Institut Fourier, Université Grenoble-Alpes | |
2020 | Alex Eskin (b. 1965) |
Ukraine United States |
"for revolutionary discoveries in the dynamics and geometry of moduli spaces of Abelian differentials, including the proof of the 'magic wand theorem'."[16] | University of Chicago | |
Maryam Mirzakhani (1977–2017) (posthumously awarded) |
Iran United States |
Stanford University | |||
2021 | Martin Hairer (b. 1975) |
Austria United Kingdom |
"for transformative contributions to the theory of stochastic analysis, particularly the theory of regularity structures in stochastic partial differential equations."[17][18] | Imperial College London | |
2022 | Takurō Mochizuki (b. 1972) |
Japan | "for monumental work leading to a breakthrough in our understanding of the theory of bundles with flat connections over algebraic varieties, including the case of irregular singularities."[19]" | Kyoto University |
New Horizons in Mathematics Prize[]
The past laureates of the New Horizons in Mathematics prize were:[20]
- 2016
- André Arroja Neves
- Larry Guth
- (prize was rejected by Peter Scholze)
- 2017
- 2018
- 2019
- 2020
- 2021
- Bhargav Bhatt – "For outstanding work in commutative algebra and arithmetic algebraic geometry, particularly on the development of p-adic cohomology theories."
- Aleksandr Logunov – "For novel techniques to study solutions to elliptic equations, and their application to long-standing problems in nodal geometry."
- Song Sun – "For many groundbreaking contributions to complex differential geometry, including existence results for Kähler–Einstein metrics and connections with moduli questions and singularities."
- 2022
- and – "For contributions to the proof of Zimmer's conjecture."
- Jack Thorne – "For transformative contributions to diverse areas of algebraic number theory, and in particular for the proof, in collaboration with James Newton, of the automorphy of all symmetric powers of a holomorphic modular newform."
- Jacob Tsimerman – "For outstanding work in analytic number theory and arithmetic geometry, including breakthroughs on the André–Oort and Griffiths conjectures."
Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize[]
- 2021
- Nina Holden – "For work in random geometry, particularly on Liouville quantum gravity as a scaling limit of random triangulations."
- Urmila Mahadev – "For work that addresses the fundamental question of verifying the output of a quantum computation."
- Lisa Piccirillo – "For resolving the classic problem that the Conway knot is not smoothly slice."
- 2022
- "For contributions to arithmetic combinatorics and analytic number theory, particularly with regards to polynomial patterns in dense sets."
- – "For advances on the restriction conjecture, the local smoothing conjecture, and related problems."
- – "For innovative and far-reaching work on the Loewner energy of planar curves."
See also[]
- Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
- Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
- List of mathematics awards
Notes[]
- ^ "Yuri Milner | Technology Investor & Science Philanthropist". www.yurimilner.com.
- ^ Overbye, Dennis (14 December 2013). "$3 Million Prizes Will Go to Mathematicians, Too". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 August 2018.
- ^ a b Markoff, John (10 November 2015). "Breakthrough Prize Looks to Stars to Shine on Science". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 August 2018.
Yuri Milner: 'We peaked 50 years ago and it has been a downward slope since then.'
- ^ Chang, Kenneth (23 June 2014). "The Multimillion-Dollar Minds of 5 Mathematical Masters". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 August 2018.
- ^ "Mathematics Breakthrough Prize > Laureates > Simon Donaldson". Archived from the original on 2014-11-01. Retrieved 2014-06-24.
- ^ "Mathematics Breakthrough Prize > Laureates > Maxim Kontsevich". Archived from the original on 2014-11-01. Retrieved 2014-06-24.
- ^ "Mathematics Breakthrough Prize > Laureates > Jacob Lurie". Archived from the original on 2014-11-01. Retrieved 2014-06-24.
- ^ "Mathematics Breakthrough Prize > Laureates > Terence Tao". Archived from the original on 2014-11-01. Retrieved 2014-06-24.
- ^ "Mathematics Breakthrough Prize > Laureates > Richard Taylor".
- ^ The New York Times (6 November 2015). "Breakthrough Prizes Give Top Scientists the Rock Star Treatment". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 August 2018.
- ^ "Breakthrough Prize – Mathematics Breakthrough Prize Laureates – Ian Agol". breakthroughprize.org.
- ^ "Breakthrough Prize – Breakthrough Prize Marks 5th Anniversary Celebrating Top Achievements In Science And Awards More Than $25 Million In Prizes At Gala Ceremony In Silicon Valley". breakthroughprize.org.
- ^ "Breakthrough Prize – Mathematics Breakthrough Prize Laureates – Christopher Hacon". breakthroughprize.org.
- ^ "Breakthrough Prize – Mathematics Breakthrough Prize Laureates – James McKernan". breakthroughprize.org.
- ^ "Breakthrough Prize – Winners of the 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics Announced". breakthroughprize.org.
- ^ "Breakthrough Prize – Winners Of The 2020 Breakthrough Prize In Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics And Mathematics Announced". breakthroughprize.org.
- ^ "Breakthrough Prize – Winners Of The 2021 Breakthrough Prizes In Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics And Mathematics Announced". breakthroughprize.org.
- ^ Sample, Ian, ed. (September 10, 2020). "UK mathematician wins richest prize in academia" – via www.theguardian.com.
- ^ "Breakthrough Prize – Winners Of The 20212 Breakthrough Prizes In Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics And Mathematics Announced". breakthroughprize.org. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
- ^ "Breakthrough Prize – Mathematics Breakthrough Prize – Laureates". breakthroughprize.org.
External links[]
- Academic awards
- International awards
- Mathematics awards
- Awards established in 2013
- Russian science and technology awards