Ben Brubaker

Every four years, the math world’s preeminent awards are given to the finest minds of a generation. The young winners — all under 40 on the first day of the year — have reshaped mathematics and theoretical computer science. Here are their stories.

Shayan Oveis Gharan has won the Abacus Medal for using tools from across mathematics to boost the power of algorithms.

When checking that solutions to certain problems are correct, it turns out, you can’t get around the inherent complexity of the quantum world.

A graduate student recently harnessed the complexity of mathematical proofs to create a powerful new tool in cryptography.

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard were recognized for their foundational work in quantum information science.

Henry Yuen is developing a new mathematical language to describe problems whose inputs and outputs aren’t ordinary numbers.

The math of data structures helps us understand how different storage systems come with different trade-offs between resources such as time and memory.

Is the inside of a vision model at all like a language model? Researchers argue that as the models grow more powerful, they may be converging toward a singular “Platonic” way to represent the world.

Researchers have used metamathematical techniques to show that certain theorems that look superficially distinct are in fact logically equivalent.