# Professor Martin Hairer winner of the 2021 Breakthrough Prize!

Martin Hairer, professor at Imperial College London, is the single winner of the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics

The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics is an annual award of the Breakthrough Prize series, inaugurated in 2013, where laureates receive $3 million each in prize money for outstanding contributions in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics. The idea behind the Breakthrough Prize, renowned as the “Oscars of Science”, is that if scientists are viewed as celebrities, on a par with movie and rock stars, then more young students will aspire to be scientists. The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki. Sponsorship is provided through the personal foundations established by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Ma Huateng, Jack Ma, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki, some of the most influential business people in science and tech industry today. In addition, the Breakthrough Prize Board also selects up to three laureates for the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize which awards$100,000 to early-career researchers. In 2019, both Kaisa Matomäki and Karim Adiprasito received the award, and for 2021 the award goes to Aleksandr Logunov. All three are 2020 EMS Prize winners.

Also, in 2021, the first Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes of \$50,000 are to be awarded to a number of women mathematicians who have completed their PhDs within the past two years.

All winners for the Breakthrough Prize series 2021 were announced in September 2020.

The Breakthrough Prize has recognized Professor Sir Martin Hairer KBE FRS “for transformative contributions to the theory of stochastic analysis, particularly the theory of regularity structures in stochastic partial differential equations.”

Martin Hairer is a professor of Pure Mathematics and Chair in Probability and Stochastic Analysis in the Department of Mathematics, Imperial College, London. His main area of research is the study of stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs); other research interests include nonequlibrium statistical mechanics, stochastic differential equations, stochastic processes with memory, and the general theory of Markov processes. He will be delivering the Hirzebruch Lecture at the 8ECM in 2021.

An interview by Imperial with Professor Hairer is published here, including more details about his research, his inspiration, and what it feels like to win.

We congratulate Professor Hairer and wish him successful work in the future!

Sources

https://breakthroughprize.org/

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/10/science/breakthrough-prize-science-awards.html

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/203853/imperial-mathematician-scoops-3m-breakthrough-prize/