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

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]

2021

The 2021 prize was announced in September 2020, and it was made to:

• Martin Hairer - "For transformative contributions to the theory of stochastic analysis, particularly the theory of regularity structures in stochastic partial differential equations."[17][18]

New Horizons in Mathematics Prize

The past laureates of the New Horizons in Mathematics prize were:[19]

• 2016
  • André Arroja Neves
  • Larry Guth
  • (prize was rejected by Peter Scholze)
• 2017
  • Geordie Williamson
  • Benjamin Elias
  • Hugo Duminil-Copin
  • Mohammed Abouzaid
• 2018
  • Zhiwei Yun
  • Wei Zhang
  • Maryna Viazovska
  • Aaron Naber
• 2019
  • Chenyang Xu
  • Karim Adiprasito
  • June Huh
  • Kaisa Matomäki
  • Maksym Radziwill
• 2020
  • Tim Austin
  • Emmy Murphy
  • Xinwen Zhu
• 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."

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."

See also

• Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
• Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
• List of mathematics awards

Notes

1. "Yuri Milner | Technology Investor & Science Philanthropist". www.yurimilner.com.
2. Overbye, Dennis (14 December 2013). "$3 Million Prizes Will Go to Mathematicians, Too". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 August 2018.
3. 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.'
4. Chang, Kenneth (23 June 2014). "The Multimillion-Dollar Minds of 5 Mathematical Masters". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 August 2018.
5. "Mathematics Breakthrough Prize > Laureates > Simon Donaldson". Archived from the original on 2014-11-01. Retrieved 2014-06-24.
6. "Mathematics Breakthrough Prize > Laureates > Maxim Kontsevich". Archived from the original on 2014-11-01. Retrieved 2014-06-24.
7. "Mathematics Breakthrough Prize > Laureates > Jacob Lurie". Archived from the original on 2014-11-01. Retrieved 2014-06-24.
8. "Mathematics Breakthrough Prize > Laureates > Terence Tao". Archived from the original on 2014-11-01. Retrieved 2014-06-24.
9. "Mathematics Breakthrough Prize > Laureates > Richard Taylor".
10. The New York Times (6 November 2015). "Breakthrough Prizes Give Top Scientists the Rock Star Treatment". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 August 2018.
11. "Breakthrough Prize – Mathematics Breakthrough Prize Laureates – Ian Agol". breakthroughprize.org.
12. "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.
13. "Breakthrough Prize – Mathematics Breakthrough Prize Laureates – Christopher Hacon". breakthroughprize.org.
14. "Breakthrough Prize – Mathematics Breakthrough Prize Laureates – James McKernan". breakthroughprize.org.
15. "Breakthrough Prize – Winners of the 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics Announced". breakthroughprize.org.
16. "Breakthrough Prize – Winners Of The 2020 Breakthrough Prize In Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics And Mathematics Announced". breakthroughprize.org.
17. "Breakthrough Prize – Winners Of The 2021 Breakthrough Prizes In Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics And Mathematics Announced". breakthroughprize.org.
18. Sample, Ian, ed. (September 10, 2020). "UK mathematician wins richest prize in academia" – via www.theguardian.com.
19. "Breakthrough Prize – Mathematics Breakthrough Prize – Laureates". breakthroughprize.org.

External links

• Official website
• Breakthrough Prize — News
• Breakthrough Prize — Mathematics Breakthrough Prize — Laureates
• Breakthrough Prize — Mathematics Breakthrough Prize — Laureates, New Horizons