Today Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced awardees of Crafoord science prize 2008. Two Russian researchers and one American scientist shared the prize in astronomy and mathematics.
      
      The Crafoord prize, worth $500 thousand, rates among largest annual awards in the world and goes to eminent scientists, performing research in astronomy, mathematics, biosciences, geosciences and polyarthritis. First time the prize was awarded in 1982, and its founders have chosen abovementioned disciplines for their prize to become an addition to the Nobel Prize.
      
      One Russian prize winner, Maksim Koncevich, is currently employed in French Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (Institute of Higher Scientific Research), Bures-sur-Yvette, and shared his prize with American scientist Edward Witten from Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Researchers were awarded “for important contribution to mathematics, inspired by theoretical physics”.
      
      Second awardee, Rashid Sunyaev, performs research in Russian Institute of Space Research and German Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. The scientist received the prize for “his decisive contributions to high-energy astrophysics and cosmology, in particular processes and dynamics around black holes and neutron stars and demonstration of the diagnostic power of structures in the background radiation”.
      
      Source: Crafoord Prize website