The Shaw Prize is an international award that has been granted on an annual basis since 2004. It is awarded to individuals “regardless of race, nationality and religious belief who have achieved significant breakthrough…” in three different fields. It is based in Hong Kong, administered by The Shaw Prize Foundation.
Some of the individuals who have been awarded this prize are:
ASTRONOMY
-P. James E. Peebles, for numerous contributions to cosmology, including contributions to big bang necleosynthesis, dark matter, and dark energy. He was responsible for a lot of work that established physical cosmology as a respectable field.
-Michel Mayor and Geoffrey Marcy, for discovering the first extrasolar planets; Marcy discovered seventy of the first hundred, while Mayor co-discovered the first extrasolar planet orbiting a sun-like star.
-Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian P. Schmidt, for discovering cosmic acceleration (the accelerating expansion of the universe), which was named the Science Magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year; and dark energy.
-Peter Goldreich, for his work in astrophysics and planetary sciences. He was one of the first to describe polar wander, the evolution of planetary nebulae, and predict that certain planetary rings of Saturn and Uranus were held in place by shepherd moons.
-Reinhard Genzel, for tracking the motions of stars at the centre of the Milky Way and demonstrating the existence of a supermassive black hole there.
LIFE SCIENCE AND MEDICINE
-Stanley N. Cohen and Herbert W. Boyer, for their discoveries in DNA cloning and genetic engineering.
-Kan Yuet-wai, for his discovery of DNA polymorphism; he is best known for his discoveries in sickle cell and thalassemia.
-Sir Richard Doll, for his work in cancer epidemiology; he was a pioneer in the discovery that smoking caused lung cancer and was linked to other health problems.
-Wang Xiaodong, for his work in calcium signaling in cellular regulation.
-Robert Lefkowitz, for his work with G-protein coupled receptors; he was a pioneer in cell receptor biology and biochemistry.
-Keith Campbell, Sir Ian Wilmut, and Shinya Yamanaka, for innovations in reversing the process of cell differentiation in mammals.
MATHEMATICAL SCIENCE
-Chern Shiing-shen, for his initiation of global differential geometry.
-Andrew Wiles, for his proof of Fermat’s last theorem.
-David Mumford, for his pattern theory and vision research.
-Wu Wenjun, for his work in mathematics mechanization.
-Robert Langlands and Richard Taylor, for their work with the Langlands program.
-Vladimir Arnold and Ludwig Faddeev, for widespread and influential contributions to mathematical physics.
Nominations for the award close in November of the previous year, and the announcements are made in the summer of the year for which the recipient is presented the medal.
The purse for the prize is USD 1 million. In addition, each recipient of the award is gifted a medal displaying a portrait of Sir Run Run Shaw, the man who initiated the award, and information about the award’s title, year, category, and recipient.
Sources:
http://www.shawprize.org
http://en.wikipedia.org
