The 2019 Breakthrough Award winners were announced on Wednesday. This is a list that covers the entire spectrum of human intellect, but there is one name that stands out for its sheer abstractness. It’s Vincent Lafforgue. Laforgue was a mathematician at the Fourier Institute in Grenoble, France, who was recognized for his work on the Langlands program. He’s not the only one at the top. A total of $22 million in funds will be distributed among nine recipients. Six go to life sciences. Two to physics. One is mathematics.
This is not just an academic award presented in a stuffy lecture hall. The Breakthrough Prize was founded in 2012 by physicist and entrepreneur Yuri Milner, and it is now being awarded for the seventh time. The goal is deliberate. It’s hard science wrapped in Hollywood splendor. It is about using glamour to charm the general public. If you want people to be interested in quantum mechanics and gene editing, you probably need to roll out the red carpet for them.
The ceremony is scheduled for November 4 at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. Pierce Brosnan will host the event. You can already imagine the lineup. Morgan Freeman. Mila Kunis.
Ashton Kutcher. The CEOs of Spotify, YouTube and Virgin Galactic are also on the invitation list. That kind of star power is usually given to superhero blockbusters, not peer-reviewed journals.
The Breakthrough Prize celebrates science by wrapping it in Hollywood glamour and aims to capture the public’s imagination.
Why is this important? Because science rarely gets this kind of attention. Often found in the footnotes of a news cycle or in the appendices of a textbook. By bringing it into the spotlight, Milner’s creation forces conversations that might not have happened otherwise. It asks the tech giants and the movie stars sitting in the front row to acknowledge that the next big breakthrough won’t come from a viral app or a sequel. It was a mathematician or geneticist in a laboratory in Grenoble.
Allocation of funds is also important. 22 million dollars across nine people, which is a lot of money. In this way, researchers can focus on their research without the constant grind of fundraising. But the prestige? This is probably the most valuable currency. It lets the world know that deep, difficult, abstract thinking is still respected. Even if that party includes a tuxedo and a champagne toast in a NASA hangar.
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