Since there is no Nobel Prize for mathematics, two prizes have become the substitute - the Field Prize for young scientists up to the age of 40 and the Shaw Prize, which is actually awarded for lifetime achievement
Prof. Noga Alon from Tel Aviv University and Princeton has won the Shaw Prize in Mathematics for 2022. Prof. Alon, one of the world's top researchers in mathematics and computer science, is the second Israeli in history to win the prestigious prize.
Noga Alon, born in 1956, is professor emeritus of mathematics and computer science at Tel Aviv University and tenured professor of mathematics at Princeton University. Prof. Alon joined Tel Aviv University in 1985, where he served as the head of the School of Mathematical Sciences and was entrusted with the chair of combinatorics and computer science. He is a member of the Israeli National Academy of Sciences and the European Academy of Sciences. In the past he won the Israel Prize, the A.M.T. Prize and the Gedel Prize.
The Shao Prize was founded in 2002 by the Hong Kong media tycoon Ran Ran Shao, who decided to award it annually to "individuals, without reference to race, nationality or religious belief, who have achieved significant and groundbreaking achievements in academic, scientific or applied research, and whose work has had a positive and profound impact on Humanity" - and this in three categories: mathematics, astronomy and life sciences and medicine. The prize in each category amounts to a total of 1.2 million dollars.
"Since there is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, there are two prizes, Obel and Shaw, which consider themselves equivalent to the Nobel in this field," explains Prof. Alon. "Obviously, like any other award, winning depends on various factors, including the composition of the committee, and maybe in the end it's also a bit of a matter of luck - because there are certainly several researchers in the world who deserve the award. For me, this is a very pleasant surprise, and the list of previous winners of the Shaw award is really impressive."
In 2020, Prof. David Kashdan from the Hebrew University won the prize, and this year Prof. Alon shares the Shaw Prize in mathematics with another Israeli: Prof. Ehud Hrushovsky from Oxford. "Israel is a very strong country in science in general, and mathematics and computer science in particular," says Prof. Alon. "The status of Israeli research in these fields in the world far exceeds the relative size of the population. My own research focuses on combinatorics, which is the mathematics of finite structures, with uses and applications to computer science, additive number theory, combinatorial geometry, and other related fields."
The Shaw Prize is awarded to Prof. Alon for the entirety of his groundbreaking work, including laying the foundations for streaming algorithms (handling streaming information) used in big data analysis (huge data) and developing algebraic and probabilistic methods to handle problems in graph theory and additive number theory. "[Noga Alon] presented new methods and reached revolutionary results", the judges wrote, "which shaped the entire field from the ground up".
