Silicon Valley giants have awarded $15 million in prizes to mathematicians

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation, which is funded by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, and investor Yuri Milner, just doled out five $3 million awards to cutting edge math projects. The Breakthrough Prizes, there have been two previously, are designed to raise awareness of math and make it a more compelling career choice for the young. Sure, $15 million will do that, but really anything that makes people stop and think about how crucial math is to the technology that surrounds us is a good thing. So, what were the prizes awarded for? Well, pause for one moment to realize that “raising awareness” doesn’t equal “making accessible”.

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation, which is funded by a group of high-profile Silicon Valley luminaries, has named five winners of its first mathematics prize. This prize, announced last year by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and investor Yuri Milner, will give $3 million each to the winners and is aimed at making math a more appealing career choice. The Breakthrough Prizes — there is also one in life science and one in fundamental physics — were created by the pair, as well as their wives, Priscilla Chan and Julia Milner, with Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Jack Ma and Cathy Zhang. Along with the news of the award, the Breakthrough Foundation also said that former Genentech CEO Art Levinson will step down as chairman of the life science board, due to the time commitments of his new job as CEO of Calico, an R&D biotech company owned by Google. Cori Bargmann, a neurobiologist at Rockefeller University and a previous Breakthrough Prize winner in life sciences, will succeed him.