Top mathematicians will be rewarded for thinking big under a new $3 million prize announced by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Milner, a self-described "failed physicist" who made his fortune in high-tech investments, told The Guardian that he wanted the new Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics to encourage people to think more deeply about life. The prize will be awarded for the first time next year.
"If you take the largest scales possible, there are a number of scientists, individuals, who operate at that scale, they think about the whole universe. I think that we focus too much on small scales as human beings and not enough on larger scales. That is really the problem we are trying to address here," he told the paper Thursday.
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