Three of Four 2025 Shaw Prize Recipients are IAS Scholars
Three of the four recipients of this year's Shaw Prize are IAS affiliated scholars: John Richard Bond, Member (2018) and Visitor (2012) in the School of Natural Sciences, jointly received the Shaw Prize in Astronomy alongside George Efstathiou, Visitor (1986) in the School, and Kenji Fukaya, Member (2002) in the School of Mathematics, was awarded the Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences.
Bond and Efstathiou received the award for "their pioneering research in cosmology, in particular for their studies of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background." The cosmic microwave background is the residual electromagnetic radiation permeating the universe that originated approximately 380,000 years after the Big Bang, providing scientists with crucial observational evidence of the early universe's conditions.
According to the Shaw Prize citation, Bond and Efstathiou "emphasized the importance of the background as a cosmological probe and took the crucial step of making precise predictions for what can be learned from specific models of the history and the composition of the mass and energy in the universe." Their predictions "have been verified by an armada of ground-, balloon- and space-based instruments, leading to precise determinations of the age, geometry, and mass-energy content of the universe."
Meanwhile, Fukaya was lauded for "his pioneering work on symplectic geometry." Symplectic geometry is a branch of mathematics that studies special even-dimensional spaces equipped with a structure that precisely measures area and preserves certain geometric properties, allowing mathematicians to analyze abstract spaces through area-preserving transformations.
Within this field, Fukaya was honored "for envisioning the existence of a category—nowadays called the Fukaya category—consisting of Lagrangians on a symplectic manifold, for leading the monumental task of constructing it, and for his subsequent ground-breaking and impactful contributions to symplectic topology, mirror symmetry, and gauge theory."
Previous IAS-affiliated winners of the Shaw Prize include Peter Sarnak, Professor Emeritus in the School of Mathematics, who was awarded the prize in Mathematical Sciences in 2024; Shing-Tung Yau, Professor in the School (1980–84), and Vladimir Drinfeld, Member (1990, 1996–97, 1998) and Visiting Professor (2019–20) in the School, who received the 2023 prize in Mathematical Sciences; and frequent Visiting Professor Noga Alon, who won the 2022 Shaw Prize in the same category.
Read the full citations for the 2025 winners on the Shaw Prize website.
