Physics Wins Big

$3 million each for 9 theorists from Yuri Milner Foundation Fundamental Physics Prize

IAS big winner.

Milner Prize: Guth (MIT), Linde (Stanford); Arkani-Hamed, Maldacena, Seiberg and Witten (IAS); Kitaev (Caltech); Kontsevich (IASS); and, Sen (Chandra Institute).

String theory, inflation and quantum computing.
Heavy on IAS, the Techs and Russian expats.
All good choices.

Follows hard on the heels of the Simons Foundation Investigator awards.

Aleiner (Columbia); Brenner (Harvard); Glotzer (Michigan); Hastings (Duke); Hirata (Caltech); Kane (UPenn); Ooguri (Caltech); Pretorius (Princeton); Quataert (UCB).

Some IAS alumns there... broader group of topics though.

Interestingly, both foundations did their inaugural awards as "fingers of god" - making their own internal choices with their own criteria, presumably in some cases with some guidance from senior scientists - I am inferring based on subtle patterns in who got the awards...

"The $3 million has already appeared in Dr. Guth's bank account, one that had had a balance of $200. "Suddenly, it said, $3,000,200," he said. "The bank charged a $12 wire transfer fee, but that was easily affordable."

Mr. Milner personally selected the inaugural group, but future recipients of the Fundamental Physics Prize, to be awarded annually, will be decided by previous winners."

Nice to see some money flowing back from the spectacular success of physics, math and computer science alumni in the technical finance sectors.
Keep it coming... pretty please.

Could be some interesting sociology of confirmation bias in future awards, we'll see how it goes.

Categories

More like this

Science magazine seemed to imply there was some grousing about the new Fundamental Physics Prizes awarded by billionaire Yuri Milner, but we in Rehovot think it’s a good thing. While one can quibble about which fields are still underfunded, we believe that any support for truly basic research --…
In addition to the distinguished Dr. Hawking, the Perimeter institute lands nine very impressive distinguished research chairs, including some familiar quantum names. The presser: Nine Leading Researchers Join Stephen Hawking as Distinguished Research Chairs at Perimeter Institute in Ontario,…
Back at the LHC Shows the Way workshop at the Aspen Center for Physics - more discussion of Higgs alternatives and peculiar branching ratios. No, the branching ratios for the different decay modes of the 125 GeV boson that is putatively the Higgs are not anomalous at a statistically significant…
At the beginning of the year, we published an interview with Dr. Zohar Komargodski on this blog. Apparently we were not the only ones impressed by Komargodski’s accomplishments: The Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation has announced that he will be one of three recipients of a New Horizons in…

sir please urgently provide me some contact detail of mr yuri milner .avery confidential work i want to send him sir please please please help me

By jr mohapatra (not verified) on 11 Aug 2012 #permalink