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		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
2023		Daniel Spielman (b. 1970)	United States	"for breakthrough contributions to theoretical computer science and mathematics, including to spectral graph theory, the Kadison-Singer problem, numerical linear algebra, optimization, and coding theory." [20]	Yale University
2024		Simon Brendle (b. 1981)	Germany   United States	"for transformative contributions to differential geometry, including sharp geometric inequalities, many results on Ricci flow and mean curvature flow and the Lawson conjecture on minimal tori in the 3-sphere." [21]	Columbia University

New Horizons in Mathematics Prize

The past laureates of the New Horizons in Mathematics prize were: ^[22]

• 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."
• 2022
  • Aaron Brown and Sebastian Hurtado Salazar – "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 conjecture
• 2023
  • Ana Caraiani – "For diverse transformative contributions to the Langlands program, and in particular for work with Peter Scholze on the Hodge-Tate period map for Shimura varieties and its applications."
  • Ronen Eldan – "For the creation of the stochastic localization method, that has led to significant progress in several open problems in high-dimensional geometry and probability, including Jean Bourgain's slicing problem and the KLS conjecture."
  • James Maynard – "For multiple contributions to analytic number theory, and in particular to the distribution of prime numbers."
• 2024 ^[21]
  • Roland Bauerschmidt, New York University – "For outstanding contributions to probability theory and the development of renormalisation group techniques."
  • Michael Groechenig, University of Toronto – "For contributions to the theory of rigid local systems and applications of p-adic integration to mirror symmetry and the fundamental lemma."
  • Angkana Rüland, University of Bonn – "For contributions to applied analysis, in particular the analysis of microstructure in solid-solid phase transitions and the theory of inverse problems."

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
  • Sarah Peluse – "For contributions to arithmetic combinatorics and analytic number theory, particularly with regards to polynomial patterns in dense sets."
  • Hong Wang – "For advances on the restriction conjecture, the local smoothing conjecture, and related problems."
  • Yilin Wang – "For innovative and far-reaching work on the Loewner energy of planar curves."
• 2023
  • Maggie Miller – "For work on fibered ribbon knots and surfaces in 4-dimensional manifolds."
  • Jinyoung Park – "For contributions to the resolution of several major conjectures on thresholds and selector processes."
  • Vera Traub – "For advances in approximation results in classical combinatorial optimization problems, including the traveling salesman problem and network design."
• 2024 ^[21]
  • Hannah Larson, University of California, Berkeley (PhD Stanford University 2022) – "For advances in Brill-Noether theory and the geometry of the moduli space of curves."
  • Laura Monk, University of Bristol (PhD University of Strasbourg 2021) – "For advancing our understanding of random hyperbolic surfaces of large genus."
  • Mayuko Yamashita, Kyoto University (PhD University of Tokyo 2022) – "For contributions to mathematical physics, index theory."

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". The Guardian– via www.theguardian.com.
19. "Breakthrough Prize – Winners Of The 20212 Breakthrough Prizes In Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics And Mathematics Announced". breakthroughprize.org. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
20. "Breakthrough Prize – Winners Of The 2023 Breakthrough Prizes In Life Sciences, Mathematics And Fundamental Physics Announced". breakthroughprize.org. Retrieved 2022-09-22.
21. "BREAKTHROUGH PRIZE ANNOUNCES 2024 LAUREATES IN LIFE SCIENCES, FUNDAMENTAL PHYSICS, AND MATHEMATICS". BREAKTHROUGH PRIZE. September 14, 2023. Retrieved September 14, 2023.
22. "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