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AnonTechie writes:

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation, which is funded by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and investor Yuri Milner, just doled out five $3 million awards to cutting edge math projects. The Breakthrough Prizes - there have been two previously, for life science and fundamental physics - 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.

Prizes awarded to:

• Simon Donaldson, Stony Brook University and Imperial College London, 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.
• Maxim Kontsevich, Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, 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.
• Jacob Lurie, Harvard University, 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.
• Terence Tao, University of California, Los Angeles, for numerous breakthrough contributions to harmonic analysis, combinatorics, partial differential equations and analytic number theory.
• Richard Taylor, Institute for Advanced Study, 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.