17/10/2018

Vincent Lafforgue is the winner of the 2019 Breakthrough Prize.

The Breakthrough Prize, an annual science award sponsored by some of Silicon Valley's best-known professionals—Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Ma Huateng, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki—announced its 2019 winners. French mathematician Vincent Lafforgue, a researcher at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research, France) and the Fourier Institute (University of Grenoble Alpes, France), won the main Mathematics category.

In this edition, the "Oscars of Science" will distribute US $ 22 million to nine researchers for their important achievements in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics. The winners of the main categories will each receive US $ 3 million, while the six winners of the New Horizons category, which rewards early-career researchers, will receive US $ 600,000.

The awards ceremony will take place on November Wednesdays at NASA Ames Research headquarters (USA) and will be hosted by Irish actor Pierce Brosnan, famous for playing James Bond (detective 007) in the movies. The event will be streamed on the Facebook and YouTube pages of the Breakthrough Prize and National Geographic.

The mathematician and physicist Stephen Hawking, who died in March of this year, will be honored at the event. In 2013, he received the Special Prize in Fundamental Physics for his discovery that black holes emit radiation and for his contributions to the understanding of quantum gravity.

Mathematics

Vincent Lafforgue was recognized for his innovative work in areas of mathematics, particularly the Langlands program. He was a plenary speaker at ICM 2018 (Rio de Janeiro), with the lecture "Global Langlands parameterization and shtukas for reductive groups," about recent developments in the Langlands program for function fields. He is the brother of mathematician Laurent Lafforgue, Fields Medalist in 2002.

In the New Horizons category, the winners were Chinese mathematician Chenyang Xu, German mathematician Karim Adiprasito, Korean-American June Huh, Finnish mathematician Kaisa Matomäki, and Canadian mathematician Maksym Radziwill.

Xu, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) and the Beijing International Center for Mathematical Research (China), was recognized for his advances in the minimal model program and its applications to modules of algebraic varieties.

Adiprasito, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), and June Huh, from the Institute for Advanced Study, won the prize jointly for their development, with Eric Katz, of Hodge's combinatorial theory, leading to the resolution of Rota's log-concavity conjecture.

The duo Kaisa, from the University of Turku, and Maksym, from the California Institute of Technology (USA), were recognized for fundamental advances in understanding local correlations of multiplicative function values.

Meet the winners in the other categories:

Groundbreaking award in Life Sciences

C. Frank Bennett of Ionis Pharmaceuticals and Adrian R. Krainer of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, for the development of an effective anterior sense oligonucleotide therapy for children with the neurodegenerative disease spinal muscular atrophy;

Angelika Amon, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for determining the consequences of aneuploidy, an abnormal chromosome number resulting from chromosome missegregation;

Xiaowei Zhuang, from Harvard University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for discovering hidden structures in cells by developing super-resolution imaging—a method that transcends the fundamental spatial resolution limit of light microscopy;

Zhijian "James" Chen, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for elucidating how DNA triggers immune and autoimmune responses from within a cell through the discovery of the DNA-sensitive enzyme.

Innovation Award in Fundamental Physics

Charles Kane and Eugene Mele of the University of Pennsylvania are credited with presenting new ideas about topology and symmetry in physics, leading to the prediction of a new class of materials that conduct electricity only on their surface.

Special Prize for Innovation in Fundamental Physics

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, of the University of Dundee and the University of Oxford, for her fundamental contributions to the discovery of pulsars and for a lifetime of inspiring leadership in the scientific community.

New Horizons in Physics Award

Brian Metzger of Columbia University, for pioneering predictions of the electromagnetic signal from a neutron star merger, and for leadership in the emerging field of multi-messenger astronomy.

Rana Adhikari of the California Institute of Technology and Lisa Barsotti and Matthew Evans of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for their research on current and future ground-based gravitational wave detectors.

Daniel Harlow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Daniel L. Jafferis of Harvard University, and Aron Wall of Stanford University, for their fundamental insights into quantum information, quantum field theory, and gravity.