{"id":9737,"date":"2017-11-16T15:07:39","date_gmt":"2017-11-16T20:07:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=9737"},"modified":"2017-12-04T14:15:24","modified_gmt":"2017-12-04T19:15:24","slug":"breakthrough-prize-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=9737","title":{"rendered":"Breakthrough Prize 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Breakthrough Prizes for 2018 will be awarded at a ceremony on December 3, I believe at the usual NASA Hangar 1 in Mountain View.  The next day Stanford will host the 2018 Breakthrough Prize symposium, which one will be able to watch live from the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/BreakthroughPrize\">Breakthrough Prize Facebook page<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The symposium schedule is available <a href=\"http:\/\/symposium.breakthroughprize.org\/schedule\">here<\/a>, and while it does not list the Prize awardees, it does appear to list the titles of the talks.  From this it looks like the math \\$3 million will go to a geometer, who will talk about &#8220;Geometry at Higher Dimensions&#8221;.  There may be several \\$100,000 New Horizons Prizes for younger mathematicians, but at least one will be to an analytic number theorist, who will talk about &#8220;Analytic Number Theory in Everyday Life&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>For the \\$3 million physics prize, it looks like it is going to be split five ways and go to cosmologists\/astrophysicists. The talks by laureates are &#8220;The Next Decade in Cosmology&#8221;, &#8220;Gravitational Waves and Cosmology&#8221;, &#8220;Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence&#8221;, &#8220;A New Instrument for Listening to the Universe&#8221; and &#8220;The Beginning and End of the Universe&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  Some details about the prize ceremony <a href=\"https:\/\/www.broadwayworld.com\/san-francisco\/article\/Breakthrough-Prize-Announces-Celebrity-and-Special-Guests-Paying-Tribute-To-Distinguished-Scientists-20171121\">here<\/a>.  Perhaps there really is a problem with the public understanding of mathematics:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>This year, a total of seven \\$3 million prizes will be awarded &#8211; five in life sciences, one in fundamental physics, two in mathematics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  The \\$3 million for physics went to the WMAP team. For mathematics, it was Hacon and McKernan.  The posted titles for the mathematics prize winners were a red herring, they have been changed to &#8220;A Tour of Algebraic Geometry&#8221; (McKernan) and &#8220;Sphere Packing in High Dimensions&#8221; (Viazovska).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Breakthrough Prizes for 2018 will be awarded at a ceremony on December 3, I believe at the usual NASA Hangar 1 in Mountain View. The next day Stanford will host the 2018 Breakthrough Prize symposium, which one will be &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=9737\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9737"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9809,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9737\/revisions\/9809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}