$1 Million Shaw Prize Goes to Simon Donaldson and Clifford Taubes

June 25, 2009

Simon K. Donaldson and Clifford H. Taubes have been named winners of the 2009 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences for their "many brilliant contributions to geometry in three and four dimensions."

The duo will pick up the $1 million prize in Hong Kong this October.

The Shaw Prize Mathematical Sciences Committee wrote Donaldson and Taubes "are the two geometers who have transformed the whole subject by pioneering techniques and ideas originating in theoretical physics, including quantum theory," and "have totally changed our geometrical understanding of space and time."

Donaldson, who is the Royal Society Research Professor of Pure Mathematics and President of the Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Imperial College, received his Ph.D. from Oxford University in 1983 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1986. He received the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics in 2008.

Taubes, who is the William Petschek Professor of Mathematics at Harvard, received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1980. In 1991 he received the AMS Veblen Prize and in 2008 won the NAS Award in Mathematics. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.