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.
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]
Year | Portrait | Laureate (birth/death) | Country | Rationale | Affiliation |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
2015 [4] | ![]() | Simon Donaldson (b. 1957) | ![]() | "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) | ![]() ![]() | "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) | ![]() | "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) | ![]() ![]() | "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) | ![]() ![]() | "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) | ![]() | "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) | ![]() | "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) | ![]() ![]() | "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) | ![]() | University of California, San Diego | ||
2019 | ![]() | Vincent Lafforgue (b. 1974) | ![]() | "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) | ![]() | "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) | ![]() ![]() | Stanford University | ||
2021 | ![]() | Martin Hairer (b. 1975) | ![]() ![]() | "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) | ![]() | "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) | ![]() | "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) | ![]() ![]() | "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 |
The past laureates of the New Horizons in Mathematics prize were: [22]
Yuri Milner: 'We peaked 50 years ago and it has been a downward slope since then.'
Maxim Lvovich Kontsevich is a Russian and French mathematician and mathematical physicist. He is a professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques and a distinguished professor at the University of Miami. He received the Henri Poincaré Prize in 1997, the Fields Medal in 1998, the Crafoord Prize in 2008, the Shaw Prize and Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2012, and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2015.
John Torrence Tate Jr. was an American mathematician distinguished for many fundamental contributions in algebraic number theory, arithmetic geometry, and related areas in algebraic geometry. He was awarded the Abel Prize in 2010.
Pierre René, Viscount Deligne is a Belgian mathematician. He is best known for work on the Weil conjectures, leading to a complete proof in 1973. He is the winner of the 2013 Abel Prize, 2008 Wolf Prize, 1988 Crafoord Prize, and 1978 Fields Medal.
Richard Lawrence Taylor is a British mathematician working in the field of number theory. He is currently the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor in Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University.
Vladimir Gershonovich Drinfeld, surname also romanized as Drinfel'd, is a renowned mathematician from the former USSR, who emigrated to the United States and is currently working at the University of Chicago.
Michael Artin is an American mathematician and a professor emeritus in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mathematics Department, known for his contributions to algebraic geometry.
Yuri Ivanovich Manin was a Russian mathematician, known for work in algebraic geometry and diophantine geometry, and many expository works ranging from mathematical logic to theoretical physics.
In mathematics, arithmetic geometry is roughly the application of techniques from algebraic geometry to problems in number theory. Arithmetic geometry is centered around Diophantine geometry, the study of rational points of algebraic varieties.
The MIT Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP) is the hub of theoretical nuclear physics, particle physics, and quantum information research at MIT. It is a subdivision of MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science and Department of Physics.
Jack Johnson Morava is an American homotopy theorist at Johns Hopkins University.
The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics is one of the Breakthrough Prizes, awarded by the Breakthrough Prize Board. Initially named Fundamental Physics Prize, it was founded in July 2012 by Russia-born Israeli entrepreneur, venture capitalist and physicist Yuri Milner. The prize is awarded to physicists from theoretical, mathematical, or experimental physics that have made transformative contributions to fundamental physics, and specifically for recent advances.
The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences is a scientific award, funded by internet entrepreneurs Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan of Facebook; Sergey Brin of Google; entrepreneur and venture capitalist Yuri Milner; and Anne Wojcicki, one of the founders of the genetics company 23andMe.
Peter Scholze is a German mathematician known for his work in arithmetic geometry. He has been a professor at the University of Bonn since 2012 and director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics since 2018. He has been called one of the leading mathematicians in the world. He won the Fields Medal in 2018, which is regarded as the highest professional honor in mathematics.
The Breakthrough Prizes are a set of international awards bestowed in three categories by the Breakthrough Prize Board in recognition of scientific advances. The awards are part of several "Breakthrough" initiatives founded and funded by Yuri Milner and his wife Julia Milner, along with Breakthrough Initiatives and Breakthrough Junior Challenge.
Ana Caraiani is a Romanian-American mathematician, who is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Hausdorff Chair at the University of Bonn. Her research interests include algebraic number theory and the Langlands program.
Wei Zhang is a Chinese mathematician specializing in number theory. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
André da Silva Graça Arroja Neves is a Portuguese mathematician and a professor at the University of Chicago. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 2016. In 2012, jointly with Fernando Codá Marques, he solved the Willmore conjecture.
Jacob Tsimerman is a Canadian mathematician at the University of Toronto specialising in number theory and related areas. He was awarded the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in the year 2015 in recognition for his work on the André–Oort conjecture and for his work in both analytic number theory and algebraic geometry.
Laurent Fargues is a French mathematician working in number theory and arithmetic geometry.
Bhargav Bhatt is an Indian-American mathematician who is the Fernholz Joint Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University and works in arithmetic geometry and commutative algebra.