(Source: http://tech.obozrevatel.com/news)

Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner established a third scientific award for mathematicians and awarded the new winners for scientific achievements in the fields of fundamental physics and science. Among the winners are the immigrant scientist from the USSR and Stephen Hawking’s successor.

Russian businessman, the owner of Mail.ru Group Yuri Milner, together with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the establishing of a new award. Each winner in mathematical science will be awarded $ 3 million. Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg themselves will determine the first prize winners after consultations with experts. It will be the largest award for mathematicians, who, as we know, are not awarded the Nobel Prize.

This award will also be one of the three largest scientific prizes and third scientific prize founded by Yuri Milner. In the summer of 2012, Yuri Milner, a graduate of the Faculty of Physics, Moscow State University and a former employee of the Lebedev Physical Institute established the Fundamental Physics Prize, the first winners of which were nine people, including Russian scientists working abroad: Andrei Linde, Maxim Kontsevich and Alexei Kitaev. Later, the special award was won by Stephen Hawking and scientists from CERN.

Alexander Polyakov who works in the U.S. received the 2013 award. The amount of each award was $ 3,000,000, while there were established other nomination with smaller prizes, such as the New Horizons in Physics prize for young physicists. Michael Green of Cambridge University and John Schwarz of the California Institute of Technology won the physics award for “the discovery of new directions in quantum gravity and in the field of unification of the forces of nature".

In 2009, Mr. Green took up the position of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge when the famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking resigned. Both researchers, Green and Schwarz are the pioneers of the popular string theory. Six scientists at once were awarded in the field of life sciences. Alexander Varshavsky, the graduate of the Faculty of Chemistry, Moscow State University, currently working at the California Institute of Technology, received recognition for studies of intracellular destruction of proteins, which gave an impetus to the understanding and treatment of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. After defending his doctoral degree in biochemistry, he emigrated in 1977 to the United States and started working at MIT. Later he moved to Caltech.