Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics


The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics is an annual award of the Breakthrough Prize series announced in 2013.
It is supported by foundations co-founded by Julia and Yuri Milner, Mark Zuckerberg 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, 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".

New Horizons in Mathematics Prize

The past laureates of the New Horizons in Mathematics prize are:

Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize

The Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize, in honour of Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, is presented to female mathematicians who have completed their PhDs within the previous two years.
  • 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
  • *Hannah Larson, University of California, Berkeley – "For advances in Brill-Noether theory and the geometry of the moduli space of curves."
  • *Laura Monk, University of Bristol – "For advancing our understanding of random hyperbolic surfaces of large genus."
  • *Mayuko Yamashita, Kyoto University – "For contributions to mathematical physics, index theory."
  • 2025
  • *Si Ying Lee, Stanford University - "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 - "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, University of California, Berkeley - "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 computer."