The Shaw Laureates (2004-2023)
2023
Matthew Bailes
Duncan Lorimer
Maura McLaughlin
for the discovery of fast radio bursts (FRBs).
Patrick Cramer
Eva Nogales
for pioneering structural biology that enabled visualisation, at the level of individual atoms, of the protein machines responsible for gene transcription, one of life’s fundamental processes. They revealed the mechanism underlying each step in gene transcription, how proper gene transcription promotes health, and how dysregulation causes disease.
Vladimir Drinfeld
Shing-Tung Yau
for their contributions related to mathematical physics, to arithmetic geometry, to differential geometry and to Kähler geometry.
2022
Lennart Lindegren
Michael Perryman
for their lifetime contributions to space astrometry, and in particular for their role in the conception and design of the European Space Agency’s Hipparcos and Gaia missions.
Paul A Negulescu
Michael J Welsh
for landmark discoveries of the molecular, biochemical, and functional defects underlying cystic fibrosis and the identification and development of medicines that reverse those defects and can treat most people affected by this disorder. Together, these discoveries and medicines are alleviating human suffering and saving lives.
Noga Alon
Ehud Hrushovski
for their remarkable contributions to discrete mathematics and model theory with interaction notably with algebraic geometry, topology and computer sciences.
2021
Victoria M Kaspi
Chryssa Kouveliotou
for their contributions to our understanding of magnetars, a class of highly magnetized neutron stars that are linked to a wide range of spectacular, transient astrophysical phenomena. Through the development of new and precise observational techniques, they confirmed the existence of neutron stars with ultra-strong magnetic fields and characterized their physical properties. Their work has established magnetars as a new and important class of astrophysical objects.
Scott D Emr
for the landmark discovery of the ESCRT (Endosomal Sorting Complex Required for Transport) pathway, which is essential in diverse processes involving membrane biology, including cell division, cell-surface receptor regulation, viral dissemination, and nerve axon pruning. These processes are central to life, health and disease.
Jean-Michel Bismut
Jeff Cheeger
for their remarkable insights that have transformed, and continue to transform, modern geometry.
2020
Roger D Blandford
for his foundational contributions to theoretical astrophysics, especially concerning the fundamental understanding of active galactic nuclei, the formation and collimation of relativistic jets, the energy extraction mechanism from black holes, and the acceleration of particles in shocks and their relevant radiation mechanisms.
Gero Miesenböck
Peter Hegemann
Georg Nagel
for the development of optogenetics, a technology that has revolutionized neuroscience.
Alexander Beilinson
David Kazhdan
for their huge influence on and profound contributions to representation theory, as well as many other areas of mathematics .
2019
Edward C Stone
for his leadership in the Voyager project, which has, over the past four decades, transformed our understanding of the four giant planets and the outer solar system, and has now begun to explore interstellar space.
Maria Jasin
for her work showing that localized double strand breaks in DNA stimulate recombination in mammalian cells. This seminal work was essential for and led directly to the tools enabling editing at specific sites in mammalian genomes.
Michel Talagrand
for his work on concentration inequalities, on suprema of stochastic processes and on rigorous results for spin glasses.
2018
Jean-Loup Puget
for his contributions to astronomy in the infrared to submillimetre spectral range. He detected the cosmic far-infrared background from past star-forming galaxies, and proposed aromatic hydrocarbon molecules as a constituent of interstellar matter. With the Planck space mission, he has dramatically advanced our knowledge of cosmology in the presence of interstellar matter foregrounds.
Mary-Claire King
for her mapping the first breast cancer gene. Using mathematical modeling, King predicted and then demonstrated that breast cancer can be caused by a single gene. She mapped the gene which facilitated its cloning and has saved thousands of lives.
Luis A Caffarelli
for his groundbreaking work on partial differential equations, including creating a theory of regularity for nonlinear equations such as the Monge-Ampère equation, and free-boundary problems such as the obstacle problem, work that has influenced a whole generation of researchers in the field.
2017
Simon D M White
for his contributions to understanding structure formation in the Universe. With powerful numerical simulations he has shown how small density fluctuations in the early Universe develop into galaxies and other nonlinear structures, strongly supporting a cosmology with a flat geometry, and dominated by dark matter and a cosmological constant.
Ian R Gibbons (1931 - 2018)
Ronald D Vale
for their discovery of microtubule-associated motor proteins: engines that power cellular and intracellular movements essential to the growth, division, and survival of human cells.
János Kollár
Claire Voisin
for their remarkable results in many central areas of algebraic geometry, which have transformed the field and led to the solution of long-standing problems that had appeared out of reach.
2016
Ronald W P Drever (1931-2017)
Kip S Thorne
Rainer Weiss
for conceiving and designing the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), whose recent direct detection of gravitational waves opens a new window in astronomy, with the first remarkable discovery being the merger of a pair of stellar mass black holes.
Adrian P Bird
Huda Y Zoghbi
for their discovery of the genes and the encoded proteins that recognize one chemical modification of the DNA of chromosomes that influences gene control as the basis of the developmental disorder Rett syndrome.
Nigel J Hitchin
for his far-reaching contributions to geometry, representation theory and theoretical physics. The fundamental and elegant concepts and techniques that he has introduced have had wide impact and are of lasting importance.
2015
William J Borucki
for his conceiving and leading the Kepler Mission, which greatly advanced knowledge of both extrasolar planetary systems and stellar interiors.
Bonnie L Bassler
E Peter Greenberg
for elucidating the molecular mechanism of quorum sensing, a process whereby bacteria communicate with each other and which offers innovative ways to interfere with bacterial pathogens or to modulate the microbiome for health applications.
Gerd Faltings
Henryk Iwaniec
for their introduction and development of fundamental tools in number theory, allowing them as well as others to resolve some longstanding classical problems.
2014
Daniel Eisenstein
Shaun Cole
John A Peacock
for their contributions to the measurements of features in the large-scale structure of galaxies used to constrain the cosmological model including baryon acoustic oscillations and redshift-space distortions.
Kazutoshi Mori
Peter Walter
for their discovery of the Unfolded Protein Response of the endoplasmic reticulum, a cell signalling pathway that controls organelle homeostasis and quality of protein export in eukaryotic cells.
George Lusztig
for his fundamental contributions to algebra, algebraic geometry, and representation theory, and for weaving these subjects together to solve old problems and reveal beautiful new connections.
2013
Steven A Balbus
John F Hawley (1958-2021)
for their discovery and study of the magnetorotational instability, and for demonstrating that this instability leads to turbulence and is a viable mechanism for angular momentum transport in astrophysical accretion disks.
Jeffrey C Hall
Michael Rosbash
Michael W Young
for their discovery of molecular mechanisms underlying circadian rhythms.
David L Donoho
for his profound contributions to modern mathematical statistics and in particular the development of optimal algorithms for statistical estimation in the presence of noise and of efficient techniques for sparse representation and recovery in large data-sets.
2012
David C Jewitt
Jane Luu
for their discovery and characterization of trans-Neptunian bodies, an archeological treasure dating back to the formation of the solar system and the long-sought source of short period comets.
Franz-Ulrich Hartl
Arthur L Horwich
for their contributions to the understanding of the molecular mechanism of protein folding. Proper protein folding is essential for many cellular functions.
Maxim Kontsevich
for his pioneering works in algebra, geometry and mathematical physics and in particular deformation quantization, motivic integration and mirror symmetry.
2011
Enrico Costa
Gerald J Fishman
for their leadership of space missions that enabled the demonstration of the cosmological origin of gamma ray bursts, the brightest sources known in the universe.
Jules A Hoffmann
Ruslan M Medzhitov
Bruce A Beutler
for their discovery of the molecular mechanism of innate immunity, the first line of defense against pathogens.
Demetrios Christodoulou
Richard S Hamilton
for their highly innovative works on nonlinear partial differential equations in Lorentzian and Riemannian geometry and their applications to general relativity and topology.
2010
Charles L Bennett
Lyman A Page Jr
David N Spergel
for their leadership of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) experiment, which has enabled precise determinations of the fundamental cosmological parameters, including the geometry, age and composition of the universe.
David Julius
for his seminal discoveries of molecular mechanisms by which the skin senses painful stimuli and temperature and produces pain hypersensitivity.
Jean Bourgain (1954-2018)
for his profound work in mathematical analysis and its application to partial differential equations, mathematical physics, combinatorics, number theory, ergodic theory and theoretical computer science.
2009
Frank H Shu (1943-2023)
in recognition of his outstanding life-time contributions in theoretical astronomy.
Douglas L Coleman (1931-2014)
Jeffrey M Friedman
for their work leading to the discovery of leptin, a hormone that regulates food intake and body weight
Simon K Donaldson
Clifford H Taubes
for their many brilliant contributions to geometry in 3 and 4 dimensions.
2008
Reinhard Genzel
in recognition of his outstanding contributions in demonstrating that the Milky Way contains a supermassive black hole at its centre
Ian Wilmut (1944-2023)
Keith H S Campbell (1954-2012)
Shinya Yamanaka
for their recent pivotal innovations in reversing the process of cell differentiation in mammals, a phenomenon which advances our knowledge of developmental biology and holds great promise for the treatment of human diseases and improvements in agriculture practices.
Vladimir Arnold (1937-2010)
Ludwig Faddeev (1934-2017)
for their widespread and influential contributions to Mathematical Physics
2007
Peter Goldreich
in recognition of his lifetime achievements in theoretical astrophysics and planetary sciences.
Robert Lefkowitz
for his relentless elucidation of the major receptor system that mediates the response of cells and organs to drugs and hormones.
Robert Langlands
Richard Taylor
for initiating and developing a grand unifying vision of mathematics that connects prime numbers with symmetry.
2006
Saul Perlmutter
Adam Riess
Brian Schmidt
For discovering that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating, implying in the simplest interpretation that the energy density of space is non-vanishing even in the absence of any matter and radiation.
Xiaodong Wang
For his discovery of the biochemical basis of programmed cell death, a vital process that balances cell birth and defends against cancer.
David Mumford
Wentsun Wu (1919-2017)
For David Mumford's contributions to mathematics, and to the new interdisciplinary fields of pattern theory and vision research; and for Wentsun Wu's contributions to the new interdisciplinary field of mathematics mechanization.
2005
Geoffrey Marcy
Michel Mayor
For finding and characterizing the orbits and masses of the first planets around other stars, thereby revolutionizing our understanding of the processes that form planets and planetary systems.
Michael Berridge (1938-2020)
for his discoveries on calcium signalling in the regulation of cellular activity.
Andrew John Wiles
for his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
2004
P James E Peebles
for his groundbreaking contribution to cosmology. He laid the foundations for almost all modern investigations in cosmology, both theoretical and observational, transforming a highly speculative field into a precision science.
Stanley N Cohen
Herbert W Boyer
Yuet-Wai Kan
Richard Doll (1912-2005)
Prize One Laureates Half jointly to Stanley N Cohen & Herbert W Boyer for their discoveries on DNA cloning and genetic engineering Half to Yuet-Wai Kan for his discoveries on DNA polymorphism and its influence on human genetics. Prize Two Laureate Richard Doll for his contribution to modern cancer epidemiology.
Shiing-Shen Chern (1911-2004)
for his initiation of the field of global differential geometry and his continued leadership of the field, resulting in beautiful developments that are at the centre of contemporary mathematics, with deep connections to topology, algebra and analysis, in short, to all major branches of mathematics of the last sixty years.
