The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics is an award announced in 2013, and funded by Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg.
The first awards of the Prize, worth $3 million to each recipient, were made in 2014 (for the year 2015) to:
Simon Donaldson – "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 – "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."
Jacob Lurie – "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."
Terence Tao – "For numerous breakthrough contributions to harmonic analysis, combinatorics, partial differential equations and analytic number theory."
Richard Taylor – "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."
The 2016 prize was announced in November 2015, and it was made to:
Ian Agol – "For spectacular contributions to low dimensional topology and geometric group theory, including work on the solutions of the tameness, virtually Haken and virtual fibering conjectures."
The 2017 prize was announced in December 2016, and it was made to:
Jean Bourgain – "For multiple transformative contributions to analysis, combinatorics, partial differential equations, high-dimensional geometry and number theory."
