Check back for full coverage of the event and a list of the winners.
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The mathematics prize went to American Ian Agol, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, for his contributions to the study of surfaces in four-dimensions or less, a field called low-dimensional topology.
The Breakthrough Prize was founded by Russian entrepreneur, venture capitalist and physicist Yuri Milner. “These fields of investigation are advancing at an exponential pace, yet the biggest questions remain to be answered”.
YU: The fact that they have so little in terms of charge and things makes them very hard to identify and measure – a trillion can go through the detector and we might only see one.
This year you introduced a new prize for high-school children totalling 0,000. Check out his winning video below. Each received a $3 million award. Chester won a $250,000 scholarship, as well as a $100,000 donation to his high school’s science program.
The Breakthrough Prize was set up by a few of Silicon Valley’s biggest names in order to raise the profile of cutting-edge science.
“Mark and I are incredibly committed to investing in science”, said Dr. Priscilla Chan. The idea of the Breakthrough prize is to raise awareness of fundamental science. The New Horizons mathematics prize was shared by Larry Guth and André Arroja Neves for contributing to solutions in geometry. “And we have a duty to support it”. A one-hour encore of the broadcast is scheduled to air on Fox on November 29, 7 p.m. EST.
The third annual award ceremony on Sunday was hosted by Seth MacFarlane.
While the Breakthrough Prize ceremony gala is all glitter and huge prize money, the underlying theme is as serious as it can be.
Two leaders of this year’s physics “Breakthrough” award won Nobel prizes this year. The research is focussed on understanding how the light-activated ion channels and pumps of neurons can be stimulated using photons, with the long-term goals of using light to control the electrical activity of brain cells.
John Hardy, a geneticist and molecular biologist at University College London who has been studying Alzheimer’s disease since the 1980s.
Helen Hobbs, a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, made a breakthrough discovery when she developed drugs to significantly reduce blood cholesterol, which helps to fend off heart and liver disease.
Svante Pääbo, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has been recognised for leading the charge in sequencing ancient DNA and ancient genomes.
What’s next for T2K and neutrino physics? Using antineutrinos from nuclear reactors, this experiment demonstrated that the change in flavor was energy-dependent.
KamLAND Collaboration, led by Atsuto Suzuki, Iwate Prefectural University, Japan.
In 1988, UBC joined the SNO experiment in Sudbury, Ontario-designed to detect solar neutrinos through their interactions with a large tank of heavy water located two kilometres beneath the surface of the earth in a nickel mine.
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“We are delighted to congratulate the Particle Astrophysics Research group at Laurentian on this latest honour”, said Dominic Giroux, president and vice-chancellor of Laurentian University.
