Breakthrough Prize Ceremony: Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch Join Hollywood A-Listers at ‘Oscars of Science’
Presenters, performers and audience members included A-listers that could give the Oscars a run for its money.
Founded and funded by Silicon Valley titan Yuri Milner and his artist wife Julia Milner, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative co-founder Priscilla Chan, the Breakthrough Prize recognizes “scientists changing the world” with award statuettes and sizable cash prizes.
On Saturday night, April 13, the ceremony’s 10th edition was the second in a row held on the roof of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
Presenters, performers and audience members included a collection of A-listers that could give the Oscars a run for its money.
Elon Musk was in the center of it all, flanked at his table by Kim Kardashian and Brie Larson.
It was all a little surreal, even in the capital of show business.
James Corden, the host for the second year in a row, jokingly reminded Hollywood’s boldfaced names during his opening monologue.
This particular evening was not really about them (“The only agent being thanked tonight will be hydrogen cyanide”), but rather about scientists who had made world-changing discoveries.
Some of those scientists could be found taking selfies with Katy Perry, gushing about the beauty of nearby Margot Robbie, and being handed orb-shaped awards by Bradley Cooper and Venus Williams.
In addition to the aforementioned Milners, Wojicki, Downey, Cooper, Kardashian, Larson, Robbie, Cooper and Williams, presenters included Rob Lowe, Jessica Chastain, Michelle Yeoh, Alicia Keys, Olivia Wilde, Regina King, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Zoe Saldaña and Glenn Close.
Among the audience members were Perry and Orlando Bloom, Kris Jenner, Edgar Ramirez, Vin Diesel, Lizzo, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Damien Chazelle, Brian Grazer and James Gray. Edward Norton read a letter that the late Richard Dawkins wrote to his daughter.
Charlie Puth, David Foster and Adam Levine gave musical performances.
Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics
Simon Brendle “for transformative contributions to differential geometry, including sharp geometric inequalities, many results on Ricci flow and mean curvature flow and the Lawson conjecture on minimal tori in the 3-sphere.”
Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
John Cardy and Alexander Zamolodchikov “for profound contributions to statistical physics and quantum field theory, with diverse and far-reaching applications in different branches of physics and mathematics.”
New Horizons in Physics Prize
Mikhail Ivanov, Oliver Philcox and Marko Simonović “for contributions to our understanding of the large-scale structure of the universe and the development of new tools to extract fundamental physics from galaxy surveys.”
Laura M. Pérez, Paola Pinilla, Nienke van der Marel and Til Birnstiel “for the prediction, discovery and modeling of dust traps in young circumstellar disks, solving a long-standing problem in planet formation.”
Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
Carl H. June and Michael Sadelain “for the development of chimeric antigen receptor T cell immunotherapy whereby the patient’s T cells are modified to target and kill cancer cells.”
Sabine Hadida, Paul Negulescu and Fredrick Van Goor “for developing life-transforming drug combinations that repair the defective chloride channel protein in patients with cystic fibrosis.”
