Meet The 12 People Who Won $3 Million For Their Breakthroughs In Science And Math

breakthrough-prize-2014
Reuters/Stephen Lam

A record 12 Breakthrough Prizes were announced on Sunday.

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Created by Silicon Valley giants from Facebook and Google in February 2013, the Breakthrough Prize is a $33 million annual pot that is split among 11 people — or in the case of this year, 12 people — to reward life science and math researchers. An individual Breakthrough Prize is worth roughly three times the value of the Nobel Prize. 

This year, six Breakthrough Prizes went to researchers in the life sciences, and five mathematicians won for their work; though in the future, just one prize a year will go to a mathematician.

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“Alim Louis Benabid, Joseph Fourier University, for the discovery and pioneering work on the development of high-frequency deep brain stimulation (DBS), which has revolutionized the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.”

Alim Louis Benabid 2
Reuters/Stephen Lam

“C. David Allis, The Rockefeller University, for the discovery of covalent modifications of histone proteins and their critical roles in the regulation of gene expression and chromatin organization, advancing the understanding of diseases ranging from birth defects to cancer.”

david_allis_l
The Rockefeller School
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“Victor Ambros (left), University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Gary Ruvkun, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, for the discovery of a new world of genetic regulation by microRNAs, a class of tiny RNA molecules that inhibit translation or destabilize complementary mRNA targets. Each received a $3 million award.”

Victor Ambros Gary Ruvkun
Yale.edu

“Jennifer Doudna (left), University of California, Berkeley, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, Helmholtz Center for Infection Research and Umeå University, for harnessing an ancient mechanism of bacterial immunity into a powerful and general technology for editing genomes, with wide-ranging implications across biology and medicine. Each received a $3 million award.”

gabbay405
Brandeis.edu
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"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."

Simon Donaldson
Imperial College London

"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."

Maxim Kontsevich 2
Stephen Lam/Reuters
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"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."

Jacob Lurie_2014_hi res download_1
Wikipedia

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

Tao_terence_download_2
Wikipedia
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"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."

Richard Taylor
Institute For Advanced Study

There are plenty of people making a big impact in tech, too...

Aneel Bhusri
Aneel Bhusri Greylock Partners

The 50 Most Powerful People In Enterprise Tech In 2014 >>

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