Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics
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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.
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
2015
The 2015 prizes were announced in June 2014 and went to:[4]
- Simon Donaldson – "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]
- Maxim Kontsevich – "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]
- Jacob Lurie – "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]
- Terence Tao – "For numerous breakthrough contributions to harmonic analysis, combinatorics, partial differential equations and analytic number theory."[8]
- Richard Taylor – "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]
2016
The 2016 prize was announced in November 2015 and made to:
- Ian Agol – "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]
2017
The 2017 prize was announced in December 2016, and it was made to:
- Jean Bourgain – "For multiple transformative contributions to analysis, combinatorics, partial differential equations, high-dimensional geometry and number theory."[12]
2018
The 2018 prize was announced in December 2017, and it was made to:
- Christopher Hacon and James McKernan - "For transformational contributions to birational algebraic geometry, especially to the minimal model program in all dimensions."[13][14]
2019
The 2019 prize was announced in October 2018, and it was made to:
- Vincent Lafforgue - "For ground breaking contributions to several areas of mathematics, in particular to the Langlands program in the function field case."[15]
2020
The 2020 prize was announced in September 2019, and it was made to:
- Alex Eskin - "For revolutionary discoveries in the dynamics and geometry of moduli spaces of Abelian differentials, including the proof of the “magic wand theorem” with Maryam Mirzakhani."[16]
New Horizons in Mathematics Prize
The past laureates of the New Horizons in Mathematics prize were:[17]
- 2016
- André Arroja Neves
- Larry Guth
- (prize was rejected by Peter Scholze)
- 2017
- 2018
- 2019
- 2020
See also
- Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
- Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
- List of mathematics awards
Notes
- ^ http://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.
- ^ Mathematics Breakthrough Prize > Laureates > Ian Agol
- ^ Breakthrough Prize, 4 December 2016, BREAKTHROUGH PRIZE MARKS 5TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATING TOP ACHIEVEMENTS IN SCIENCE AND AWARDS MORE THAN $25 MILLION IN PRIZES AT GALA CEREMONY IN SILICON VALLEY
- ^ Mathematics Breakthrough Prize > Laureates > Christopher Hacon
- ^ Mathematics Breakthrough Prize > Laureates > James McKernan
- ^ Mathematics Breakthrough Prize 2019
- ^ Mathematics Breakthrough Prize 2020
- ^ https://breakthroughprize.org/Laureates/3/P2