The 2025 New Horizons in Mathematics Prize has been awarded to Ewain Gwynne of the University of Chicago, for his work in conformal probability, which studies probabilistic objects such as random curves and surfaces.
The prize, which is given to early-career scientists and mathematicians who have already made a substantial impact on their fields, includes an award of $100,000.
The prizes are part of a larger set awarded by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its founding sponsors: Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki. Sometimes referred to as the “Oscars of Science,” the Breakthrough Prizes are presented annually in the fields of life sciences, fundamental physics and mathematics.
Gwynne was cited for “contributions to conformal probability, in particular to the understanding of the LQG metric.”
This area of research focuses on random fractal surfaces, which are known as Liouville quantum gravity surfaces and have connections to various areas of theoretical physics. Gwynne has shown that these surfaces can be defined as metric spaces—a set whose distances between points can be measured.
“It is a great honor to receive the prize,” said Gwynne. “I would like to thank my PhD advisor, Scott Sheffield, and all of my collaborators, especially Jian Ding and Jason Miller, with whom I did much of my work on the Liouville quantum gravity metric. I am also grateful to all of the excellent students and postdocs that I have had an opportunity to work with, both at UChicago and elsewhere.”
Gwynne received his PhD from MIT and his BA from Northwestern University, and spent time at Trinity College in Cambridge before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 2020.
He plans to donate the entirety of the prize money to the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, a nonprofit focused on accelerating a cure for multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer.
A history of breakthroughs
Breakthrough Prizes have previously been awarded to multiple University of Chicago-affiliated researchers.
These include mathematician Alex Eskin for the “magic wand” theorem; physicist Craig Hogan, who received the Breakthrough Prize in 2015 for his work on the High-Z Supernova Search Team that helped prove that the universe is expanding faster and faster over time; several scientists in 2019 who were part of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration that created the first image of a black hole; Daniel Holz and Hsin-Yu Chen in 2016 for their work as part of the LIGO collaboration that made the first detection of gravitational waves; and in 2023, to two scientists who discovered a fundamental way that cells organize while teaching a course at the UChicago-affiliated Marine Biological Laboratory.
The New Horizons Prize was awarded in 2023 to Hannes Bernien and colleagues for developing methods to control individual atoms; in 2022 to mathematician Sebastian Hurtado-Salazar for proving the Zimmer conjecture; in 2019 to physicist Michael Levin for “incisive contributions to the understanding of topological states of matter and the relationships between them;” and in 2016 to mathematician André Neves for contributions to several areas of differential geometry.
