Three years ago, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner started the Breakthrough Prize Awards, which gives recognition to remarkable people and discoveries in the fields of Science and Mathematics. For this year, together with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki, Milner gave $21 million to the awardees for outstanding works in their respective fields. The event was held in NASA's Ames Research Center located on Mountain View, Calif., and was hosted by Family Guy's Seth McFarlane last Sunday.
This awarding ceremony was started in the vision by Milner in giving science the cultural recognition same as sports and entertainment. The prestige and recognition would be carried on by a group of physicists, consisting of about 1,370 people in their work for the theory of neutrino oscillation, a phenomenon in Quantum Mechanics, winning $3 million, thrice the amount for Noble Peace Prize.
In an interview, Milner said that he would have given each of them $3 million but they are not there yet, and the breakthroughs are made through a large group of people's effort rather than individual endeavors or a group of scientists in relative isolation, which gives a greater chance of sharing between the members of the group. Two thirds of the prize would be shared between seven team leaders and the rest would be distributed to the rest, amounting about $700 each. There are five prizes given to researcher for their work in various areas, from optogenetics to sequencing ancient genomes, in the field of life science. For mathematics, a prize was given to a professor who worked in low-dimensional topology and geometric group theory, from University of California Berkeley, and eight scientists won awards of $100,000 in their early careers in mathematics and physics.
As a university dropped out himself, Yuri Milner was once a physics PhD student in Moscow who migrated in to the United States in 1990. Earlier this year he remarked that he is willing to give $100 million for the exploration of intelligent life in space through radio and light signals.
