2023
Michael Groechenig
Mathematician gets timely call from ‘Oscars of Science’
2023
Mathematician gets timely call from ‘Oscars of Science’
Michael Groechenig, a researcher at the University of Toronto Mississauga, has won the 2024 New Horizons Prize in Mathematics from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
Billed as “the Oscars of science,” the Breakthrough Prize was founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner and Anne Wojcicki to recognize the world’s top scientists working in the fundamental sciences.
“It was completely surreal,” Dr. Groechenig says of learning he had won. The call came on the heels of a most joyous occasion. “Just a week after my son was born, I got this phone call from a famous mathematician who won the actual Breakthrough Prize a few years ago.”
The New Horizons Prize is awarded to promising early-career researchers who have already produced important work.
Dr. Groechenig received the award for his insights into arithmetic geometry. His research focuses on moduli spaces.
He is quick to thank his collaborators Hélène Esnault, Dimitri Wyss and Paul Ziegler for the “many interesting things they have taught me and for our joint work on the papers for which the prize was awarded.”
In 2022, Dr. Groechenig won the Sloan Fellowship.
