Five Winners Receive Inaugural Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics

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Five winners for Mathematics will receive $3 million each.

Simon Donaldson, Stony Brook University and Imperial College London, 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.

Maxim Kontsevich, Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, 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.


Jacob Lurie, Harvard University, 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.


Terence Tao, University of California, Los Angeles, for numerous breakthrough contributions to harmonic analysis, combinatorics, partial differential equations and analytic number theory.


Richard Taylor, Institute for Advanced Study, 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.


The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics was launched by Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony last December. It aims to recognize major advances in the field, honor the world's best mathematicians, support their future endeavors and communicate the excitement of mathematics to general public.


The laureates will be presented with their trophies and $3 million each at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony in November.

I am not particularly familiar with any of their work (with the exception of the small portion of Terence Tao's work on additive combinatorics/combinatorial geometry), but these are all big names. If they are careful with selection in the next few years, the Breakthrough Prize might rival the Fields Medal for prestige.

Hopefully the mathematical blogosphere will post some basic overviews of their work. If not, and if I have the time to do a quick survey, I may do so myself.