Every year, some of the world’s greatest minds in science win Yuri Milner’s prestigious Breakthrough Prize. Established to follow through on his Giving Pledge, the competition is widely considered the “Oscars of Science.”
Here, we’ll take a look at the scientists who made history in 2021 with their industry-changing research.
What is the Breakthrough Prize?
The Breakthrough Prize is a series of international awards that brings together the globe’s most pioneering scientists and recognizes their latest discoveries. The awards cover groundbreaking research in three categories: Mathematics, Fundamental Physics, and Life Sciences.
Each winner, or laureate as the awards dub them, receives a lucrative $3 million prize to help them further their research and uncover discoveries.
Julia and Yuri Milner created the Breakthrough Prize in 2012 as part of their commitment to donating at least half of their lifetime wealth to scientific causes through their Giving Pledge.
The Prize is one of the various enterprises that Yuri Milner founded: His Giving Pledge also led him to found the Breakthrough Junior Challenge and the Breakthrough Initiatives.
This Year’s Breakthrough Prize Winners
Every year, esteemed scientists and mathematicians win the prestigious Breakthrough Prize, and this year was no different.
The 2023 Breakthrough Prize laureates are:
- David Deutsch, Charles H. Bennett, Peter W. Shor, and Gilles Brassard, who won the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
- Daniel A. Spielman, who became a laureate in the Mathematics category.
- Three duos, Clifford P. Brangwynne and Anthony A. Hyman, Demis Hassbis and John Jumper, and Masashi Yanagisawa and Emmanuel Mignot, each won a Life Sciences prize.
The 2021 Breakthrough Prize Winners
In 2021, eight scientists won Breakthrough Prizes Let’s take a look at some of the winners and the impact that their ongoing work is having on the world two years later.
1. Martin Hairer
Hairer won the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics for his transformative contributions to the theory of stochastic analysis. He focused on the theory of regularity structures in stochastic partial differential equations.
Currently, as a professor of pure mathematics at EPFL (a university in Switzerland) and Imperial College London, Hairer’s lectures cover topics like advanced stochastic analysis and regularity structures.
His most recent studies include “Boundary renormalization of SPDEs,” which appeared in Communications in Partial Differential Equations, and “Generating diffusions with fractional Brownian motion,” which appeared in Communications in Mathematical Physics.
2. Eric Adelberger, Jens H. Gundlach, and Blayne Heckel
Adelberger, Gundlach, and Heckel received the 2021 Prize in Fundamental Physics for their work on precision fundamental measurements that:
- Delve into the nature of dark energy.
- Test our understanding of gravity.
- Place limits on couplings to dark matter.
Part of the Eöt-Wash Group, the three continue to pioneer new techniques to test weak-field gravity. The trio all also work as professors at the University of Washington.
Some of their recent research delves into the sequence-dependent mechanochemical coupling of helicase translocation and unwinding at single-nucleotide resolution (Gundlach) and the gravitational constant (Adelberger).
3. David Baker
Four individuals shared the 2021 Prize in Life Sciences, including David Baker, who won a Breakthrough Prize for developing a technology that enables the design of proteins that hadn’t been discovered before in nature, including proteins that have the potential for therapeutic intervention in human diseases.
Baker has continued to publish papers describing how various AI techniques could accelerate protein design. He has also launched a company that focuses on harnessing deep learning to uncover new compounds against targets for cancer and other therapeutic areas.
