Breakthrough Prize In Mathematics
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The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics is an annual award of the
Breakthrough Prize 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 M ...
series announced in 2013. It is funded by
Yuri Milner Yuri Borisovich (Bentsionovich) Milner (, ; born 11 November 1961) is a Soviet-born Israeli entrepreneur, investor, physicist and scientist. He is a co-founder and former chairperson of internet company Mail.Ru Group (later VK), and a founder ...
and
Mark Zuckerberg Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born May 14, 1984) is an American businessman who co-founded the social media service Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms, of which he is the chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling sharehold ...
and others. 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". They hope that this may make "more young students aspire to be scientists".


Laureates


New Horizons in Mathematics Prize

The past laureates of the ''New Horizons in Mathematics'' prize are: *2016 ** André Arroja Neves **
Larry Guth Lawrence David Guth (; born 1977) is a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Education and career Guth graduated from Yale University in 2000 with a BS in mathematics. In 2005, he received his PhD in mathemati ...
**(prize was rejected by
Peter Scholze Peter Scholze (; born 11 December 1987) is a German mathematician known for his work in arithmetic geometry. He has been a professor at the University of Bonn since 2012 and co-director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics since 2018. He ...
) *2017 **
Geordie Williamson Geordie Williamson (born 1981 in Bowral, Australia) is an Australian mathematician at the University of Sydney. He became the youngest living Fellow of the Royal Society when he was elected in 2018 at the age of 36. Education Educated at Cheva ...
**Benjamin Elias **
Hugo Duminil-Copin Hugo Duminil-Copin (born 26 August 1985) is a French mathematician specializing in probability theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022. Biography The son of a middle school sports teacher and a former female dancer who became a primary ...
** Mohammed Abouzaid *2018 ** Zhiwei Yun ** Wei Zhang **
Maryna Viazovska Maryna Sergiivna Viazovska (, ; born 2 December 1984) is a Ukrainian mathematician known for her work in sphere packing. She is a full professor and Chair of Number Theory Number theory is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to ...
**
Aaron Naber Aaron Naber (born November 16, 1982) is an American mathematician. Education and career Aaron Naber graduated in 2005 with a B.S. in mathematics from Pennsylvania State University. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 2009 from Princeton Uni ...
*2019 ** Chenyang Xu **
Karim Adiprasito Karim Alexander Adiprasito (born in 1988) is a German mathematician working at the University of Copenhagen and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who works in combinatorics. He completed his PhD in 2013 at Free University Berlin under the super ...
**
June Huh June E Huh (; born June 9, 1983) is an American mathematician who is currently a professor at Princeton University. Previously, he was a professor at Stanford University. He was awarded the Fields Medal and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022. He ha ...
**
Kaisa Matomäki Kaisa Sofia Matomäki (born April 30, 1985) is a Finnish mathematician specializing in number theory. Since April 2023, she is a full professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Turku, Turku, Finland. Her research inc ...
**
Maksym Radziwill Maksym Radziwill (born 24 February 1988) is a Polish-Canadian mathematician specializing in number theory. He is currently a professor of mathematics at the Northwestern University. Life He was born in Moscow in 1988. His family moved to Pola ...
*2020 **Tim Austin ** Emmy Murphy **
Xinwen Zhu Xinwen Zhu (; born 1982 in Sichuan) is a Chinese mathematician and professor at Stanford University. His work deals primarily with geometric representation theory and in particular the Langlands program, tying number theory to algebraic geometr ...
*2021 ** Bhargav Bhatt – "For outstanding work in commutative algebra and arithmetic algebraic geometry, particularly on the development of
p-adic cohomology In mathematics, p-adic cohomology means a cohomology theory for varieties of characteristic ''p'' whose values are module (mathematics), modules over a ring of ''p''-adic integers. Examples (in roughly historical order) include: * Serre's Witt vec ...
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 metric In differential geometry, a Kähler–Einstein metric on a complex manifold is a Riemannian metric that is both a Kähler metric and an Einstein metric. A manifold is said to be Kähler–Einstein if it admits a Kähler–Einstein metric. The ...
s and connections with moduli questions and singularities." *2022 **Aaron Brown and Sebastián Hurtado-Salazar – "For contributions to the proof of
Zimmer's conjecture Zimmer's conjecture is a statement in mathematics "which has to do with the circumstances under which geometric spaces exhibit certain kinds of symmetries." It was named after the mathematician Robert Zimmer Robert Jeffrey Zimmer (November 5, ...
." **
Jack Thorne Jack Thorne FRSL (born 6 December 1978) is a British playwright, television writer, screenwriter, and producer. A massive fan of hard science fiction, he is best known for writing the stage play '' Harry Potter and the Cursed Child'', the fil ...
– "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 Jacob Tsimerman (born 1988) 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 co ...
– "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 In mathematics, the Langlands program is a set of conjectures about connections between number theory, the theory of automorphic forms, and geometry. It was proposed by . It seeks to relate the structure of Galois groups in algebraic number t ...
, and in particular for work with
Peter Scholze Peter Scholze (; born 11 December 1987) is a German mathematician known for his work in arithmetic geometry. He has been a professor at the University of Bonn since 2012 and co-director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics since 2018. He ...
on the Hodge-Tate period map for Shimura varieties and its applications." **
Ronen Eldan Ronen Eldan () is an Israeli mathematician, working at OpenAI. Previously, Eldan was a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science working on probability theory, mathematical analysis, theoretical computer science and the theory of machine lea ...
– "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 **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 Angkana Rüland (born 1987) is a German applied mathematician, a professor in mathematics and holder of a Hausdorff Chair in mathematics at the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics of the University of Bonn. Her research has included work on the math ...
, 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." *2025 **Ewain Gwynne, University of Chicago - "for his work in conformal probability, which studies probabilistic objects such as random curves and surfaces." **
John Pardon John Vincent Pardon (born June 1989) is an American mathematician and works on geometry and topology. He is primarily known for having solved Gromov's problem on distortion of knots, for which he was awarded the 2012 Morgan Prize. He is a perman ...
, Stony Brook University - "for his producing a number of important results in geometry and topology, particularly in the field of
symplectic geometry Symplectic geometry is a branch of differential geometry and differential topology that studies symplectic manifolds; that is, differentiable manifolds equipped with a closed, nondegenerate 2-form. Symplectic geometry has its origins in the ...
and pseudo-holomorphic curve, which are certain types of smooth surfaces in manifolds." **Sam Raskin, Yale University - "for his playing a significant role in the major recent progress on the geometric Langlands program, including the final proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture in characteristic zero."


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 In mathematics, specifically in knot theory, the Conway knot (or Conway's knot) is a particular knot (mathematics), knot with 11 crossings, named after John Horton Conway. It is related by mutation (knot theory), mutation to the Kinoshita–Te ...
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 Vera Traub is a German applied mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for her research on approximation algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems including the travelling salesperson problem and the Steiner tree problem ...
– "For advances in approximation results in classical combinatorial optimization problems, including the
traveling salesman problem In the theory of computational complexity, the travelling salesman problem (TSP) asks the following question: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exac ...
and network design." *2024 **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." *2025 **Si Ying Lee, Stanford University (PhD Harvard University 2022) - "For her finding a new approach to an important problem in the Langlands program and succeeding in reducing it to a local problem." **Rajula Srivastava, University of Bonn and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics (PhD University of Wisconsin-Madison 2022) - "For her making a progress in a challenging area at the intersection of harmonic analysis and number theory by focusing on bounding the number of lattice points one can find near a given smooth surface, with important applications to Diophantine approximation in higher dimensions." **
Ewin Tang Ewin Tang (born 2000) is a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. She was named as one of 2019 Science ''Forbes'' 30 Under 30 for her work developing classical algorithms which matched the performance of the fastest known ...
, University of California, Berkeley (PhD University of Washington 2023) - "For her inventing quantum computing algorithms for machine learning, and proving that certain calculations, which quantum algorithms were widely considered to be exponentially faster at solving, can actually be solved in comparable time by a normal (non-quantum) computer."


See also

*
Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences 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 t ...
*
Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics 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 capit ...
*
List of mathematics awards This list of mathematics awards contains articles about notable awards for mathematics. The list is organized by the region and country of the organization that sponsors the award, but awards may be open to mathematicians from around the world. Som ...


Notes


External links

*
Breakthrough Prize — News

Breakthrough Prize — Mathematics Breakthrough Prize — Laureates

Breakthrough Prize — Mathematics Breakthrough Prize — Laureates, New Horizons
{{Breakthrough Prize laureates International academic awards International science and technology awards Mathematics awards Awards established in 2013 Russian science and technology awards Yuri Milner