B.B.C. Article
Top scientists have been awarded huge cash prizes at a ceremony on Sunday in California.
The Breakthrough Prize is backed by leading technology entrepreneurs, such as Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founder Sergey Brin.


(From L to R) Mathematics laureates Terence Tao, Jacob Lurie, Richard Taylor, Maxim Kontsevich and Simon Donaldson

The awards were presented in three categories, mathematics, life sciences and fundamental physics.
It was set up to to celebrate scientists and generate excitement about their work.
A total of $36m (£23m) was awarded in the ceremony, with each winner (or group of winners) taking home $3m (£1.9m), more than any other award for scientific work, including the Nobel Prize.
Winners included a team of astrophysicists who discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than slowing, as it had long been assumed. This team, Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess had in 2011 also won the Nobel prize for physics for the same work.

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