Breakthrough Prize
Breakthrough Prize 2015: Winners
Recipients
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Fundamental Physics
Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt, Adam G. Riess
For the most unexpected discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, rather than slowing as had been long assumed.
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Life Sciences
Alim-Louis Benabid
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.
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Life Sciences
C. David Allis
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.
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Life Sciences
Jennifer A. Doudna
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.
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Life Sciences
Victor Ambros
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.
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Mathematics
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.
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Mathematics
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.
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Mathematics
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.
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Mathematics
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.
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Mathematics
Terence Tao
for numerous breakthrough contributions to harmonic analysis, combinatorics, partial differential equations and analytic number theory.