Richard Taylor and Former Members Awarded Inaugural Breakthrough Prizes in Mathematics
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Richard Taylor, Robert and Luisa Fernholz Professor in the School of Mathematics, received the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, which recognizes major advances in the field and supports future endeavors in mathematics. Taylor is honored 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.”
Former Members of the School of Mathematics at the Institute were also awarded the Breakthrough Prize including Simon Donaldson (1983–84), Professor at Imperial College, 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 (1992–93, 2002), Professor at 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; and Terence Tao (2005), Professor at University of California, Los Angeles, for numerous breakthrough contributions to harmonic analysis, combinatorics, partial differential equations and analytic number theory. The Breakthrough Prize was also awarded to Jacob Lurie, Professor at Harvard University.
The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics was launched by Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony last December. The laureates will be presented with their trophies and $3 million each at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony in November.
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The Institute for Advanced Study is one of the world’s leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. The Institute exists to encourage and support curiosity-driven research in the sciences and humanities—the original, often speculative thinking that produces advances in knowledge that change the way we understand the world. Work at the Institute takes place in four Schools: Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Social Science. It provides for the mentoring of scholars by a permanent Faculty of approximately 30, and it ensures the freedom to undertake research that will make significant contributions in any of the broad range of fields in the sciences and humanities studied at the Institute.
The Institute, founded in 1930, is a private, independent academic institution located in Princeton, New Jersey. Its more than 6,000 former Members hold positions of intellectual and scientific leadership throughout the academic world. Thirty-three Nobel Laureates and 40 out of 56 Fields Medalists, as well as many winners of the Wolf and MacArthur prizes, have been affiliated with the Institute.