The Times: The world’s finest maths brains By Monique Rivalland
Grigori Perelman, 54
A multi-award-rejecting Russian recluse famous for his contributions to geometric topology. Perelman turned down prestigious jobs at Princeton and Stanford and in 2006 won (and rejected) the Fields Medal, seen as the Nobel prize for maths, because he did not “want to be on display like an animal in a zoo”. He has rebuffed every award since, including one worth $1 million.
Grigory Perelman, the maths genius who said no to $1m
Alex Gerko, 41
A Russian maths prodigy, Gerko founded an AI-run fintech firm in London in 2015. XTX Markets has no human traders and, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, his algorithms have taken Gerko’s net worth to $700 million. Last year XTX was one of the biggest British donors of the pandemic, giving £21.5 million to charities.
Alex Gerko gives millions to charity
Demis Hassabis, 44
Founder of DeepMind, the AI company bought by Google for $400 million in 2014. The son of a Greek Cypriot taxi driver from north London, Hassabis was a master chess player by the time he was 13, sat his A-levels at 15, and in his gap year programmed a world-famous computer game called Theme Park that bought him a Porsche, which he used to drive to freshers week at Cambridge University.
Demis Hassabis
Hou Yifan, 26
The best female chess player in the world. Hou started playing at three years old; by nine she was on the Chinese national team, becoming the youngest female grandmaster in history at 14 and women’s world chess champion at 16.
Hou Yifan youngest-ever full professor at Shenzhen University
Jim Simons, 83
Simons has been called “the most successful hedge fund manager of all time”. His quantitative investment methods – using mathematical models and algorithms – have made him an estimated $23.5 billion. Before trading he was known for his contributions to pattern recognition and string theory.
Jim Simons’ Success Story: Net Worth, Education and Top Quotes
Sir Roger Penrose, 89
Penrose is Britain’s maths poster boy and last year jointly won the Nobel prize for showing that the theory of general relativity does form black holes. He has also shared an award with Stephen Hawking, and created the “impossible” Penrose triangle.
Sir Roger Penrose: The man who proved black holes weren't 'impossible'
Wang Pok Lo, 16
Pok, as he is known, is on course to become Britain’s youngest PhD holder, from Edinburgh University. A Scotsman from Hong Kong, while at his state school in South Queensferry he achieved a first-class degree in maths by the time he was 13 and a master’s in statistics by 15.
Maths prodigy Wang Pok Lo is equal to a PhD
Alexandra Botez, 25
A Beth Harmon for the 21st century. The American-Canadian chess whizz is the daughter of Romanian refugees and competed in her first national chess championship aged eight. She has more than one million followers across Instagram, YouTube and her Twitch channel BotezLize, where she streams her chess matches.
Who are Alexandra and Andrea Botez? The chess queens of Twitch
Sir Martin Hairer, 45
The British-Austrian winner of this year’s £2.3 million Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics (Mark Zuckerberg’s science award) for his contributions to stochastic partial differential equations – which is to say, he used mind-boggling maths to explain the random effects of things like stirring a cup of tea.
Imperial mathematician scoops $3m Breakthrough Prize
Terence Tao, 45
An Australian-American sensation who has won both the Fields Medal and the Breakthrough Prize. Tao was the youngest person, at 13 years old, to win gold in the International Mathematical Olympiad.