IAS Scholars Win 2023 Breakthrough Prize Foundation Awards, including New Horizons and New Frontiers

The 2023 New Horizons in Mathematics Prize, a renowned award which honors the work of early-career mathematicians, went to past Veblen Research Instructor Ana Caraiani (2013–16), recent von Neumann Fellow Ronen Eldan (2021–22), and current Member James Maynard. Additionally, past Member Jinyoung Park (2020–21) won a 2023 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize, which recognizes the work of women in mathematics.

Maynard, who was one of the winners of the Fields Medal this year, was cited for his research pertaining to analytic number theory, specifically the distribution of prime numbers, which he will continue to work on while at the Institute. Caraiani was honored by the Committee for her work on the Langlands program, in particular on Shimura varieties, and Eldan was recognized “for the creation of the stochastic localization method,” which has led to progress in several problems in high-dimensional geometry and probability.

Park, who recently, with Huy Tuan Pham, proved the Kahn-Kalai Conjecture, a central problem in probabilistic combinatorics, was given the New Frontiers Prize for helping to resolve multiple major conjectures in her field, including another on selector processes. 

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation, which was founded by Yuri Milner and his wife Julia, has been awarding the Breakthrough Prizes since 2012, when the initiative was started by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, the Milners, and Anne Wojcicki. This year, a total of $15,750,000 was awarded.