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Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Jack Ma Hand Out ~$40 Million to Math and Scientists (1)

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Well, at least all the money we are spending on Facebook and the insane bank balance we are creating for Zuckerberg is being put to good use.

Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Jack Ma Hand Out ~$40 Million to Math and Scientists in a Two Hour Evening
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfranci....html?page=all and http://www.marketwatch.com/story/hol...sts-2014-11-10

Tech royalty threw on a Hollywood star studded celebration in Mountain View Sunday for the Breakthrough Prizes, which this year distributed $36 million to leaders in physics, life sciences and mathematics, with individual prizes of $3 million going to individual laureates and teams.

“We’re so grateful that all of you sucked at sports. Because... if you could catch a football, we’d all have polio,” quipped Seth MacFarlane at the Breakthrough Prize awards ceremony on Sunday night. By most accounts, he fared much better than he did as the host of the 2013 Oscars.

Maybe it’s because scientists are better at laughing at themselves than celebrities are.

Either way, the Family Guy creator was on hand at the lavish gala to hand out $36 million in prize money to 12 different winners across three fields, including physics, life sciences and math.

"Most people think of math as a purely analytical discipline, but it's also something that's very profound and creative," said Zuckerberg in presenting an award for significant mathematics work. He told the audience that great thinkers in numbers should be recognized like great writers and artists. Zuckerberg co-founded the awards with his wife, Priscilla Chan, Russian Internet tycoon and Facebook investor, Yuri Milner and his wife Julia Milner, Google co-Founder Sergey Brin, and Alibaba CEO Jack Ma and his wife Cathy Zhang.

To add glam and glitz to the proceedings, Sunday's gala - co-hosted by Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter - featured a performance by singer Christina Aguilera, and award presentations by actors and actresses Kate Beckinsdale, Benedict Cumberbatch, Cameron Diaz, Jon Hamm and Eddie Redmayne.

The ceremonies were produced by Emmy-award winning Los Angeles firm Don Mischer Productions and will be televised Nov. 15 on the Discovery Channel and the Science Channel.

The setting itself was grand, with guests served gourmet food in a giant white tent under the exposed skeleton of historic Hangar One at Nasa Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, which was bathed in blue lights.

Dinner was prepared by one of the world's top chefs Thomas Keller, of The French Laundry and Per Se, among other restaurants.

And, of course, jokes from master of ceremonies Seth MacFarlane, armed with plenty of zingers, like this: “With the scientific ability in this room, we could cure Ebola by 11, but let’s give out some awards instead.”

Tinsel town mixed with Silicon Valley tech luminaries including Box CEO Aaron Levie and Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, Tesla and Space-X CEO Elon Musk, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Laurene Powell Jobs and the less recognizable faces of the honorees, who were in the rare spotlight for the night. Their collective progress down a red carpet was captured by journalists snapping photographs and craning for utterances.

The highly choreographed event included some touching emotional scenes, notably a tribute of thanks from a young man who had benefited personally from the research of Joseph Fourier University's Alim Louis Benabid, who was awarded for his role in the development of deep brain stimulation, which has been important in the treatment of Parkinson's disease.

That award was presented jointly onstage by Brin and Wojcicki, the Silicon Valley spouses who publicly split earlier this year when it became public that Brin was having an affair with a Google staffer. A broadly smiling Wojcicki seemed to stump Brin when she joked about how the crowd was there to investigate the "mysteries" of his brain.

Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, per The Wall Street Journal, explained that society doesn’t fete scientists like it did Albert Einstein and Jonas Salk. “We would like to change that,” he said.

As for this year’s winners, two teams of astronomers took home the cash for their discovery that the universe, contrary to previous beliefs, isn’t shrinking, but actually expanding at an accelerating pace. They can add the windfall to what they already received for the Nobel Prize.

In life sciences, researchers won for their work in bacterial immunity and genetic regulation. And in math, the first time the category was up for the award, five people won for what they’ve done with algebraic geometry and analyst number theory. Check out the full list of winners: https://breakthroughprize.org/

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