Professor Sir Martin Hairer has won the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. Professor Hairer, Imperial College London, is recognised “for transformative contributions to the theory of stochastic analysis, particularly the theory of regularity structures in stochastic partial differential equations.”

He receives US$3 million and a trophy, to be presented at a live awards ceremony next year, and will engage in a program of lectures and discussions.

The Breakthrough Prizes are the largest prizes in science. They aim to “help scientific leaders gain freedom from financial constraints to focus fully on the world of ideas; to raise the profile and prestige of basic science and mathematics, fomenting a culture in which intellectual pursuits are validated; and to inspire the next generation of researchers to follow the lead of these extraordinary scientific role models.”

An interview with Professor Hairer, including more detail about his research, his inspiration, and what it feels like to win, is here.

Also among this year’s three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize winners are Nina Holden, ETH Zurich (for work in random geometry, particularly on Liouville Quantum Gravity as a scaling limit of random triangulations) and Lisa Piccirillo, MIT, (for resolving the classic problem that the Conway knot is not smoothly slice—see Radu’s Rides here).