Noga Alon, an Israeli mathematician and a university professor has won the 2022 prestigious Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences, it was announced Wednesday.
Alon, mathematics professor at Princeton University and Tel Aviv University, is the second Israeli to be awarded with the prize after Professor David Kazhdan from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem won the award in 2020.
Alon, 66, was awarded the prize for his contributions to discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science.
Alon joined Tel Aviv University in 1985, where he was a Baumritter Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Computer Science. He moved to Princeton in 2018, where he continues to teach mathematics.
He also serves on the editorial boards of more than a dozen international technical journals and has given invited lectures at many conferences, including plenary addresses in the 1996 European Congress of Mathematics and in the 2002 International Congress of Mathematicians. In 2008, Alon won the Israel Prize for mathematics.
The Shaw Prize was established in 2002 in Hong Kong. The international award honors "individuals, regardless of race, nationality, gender and religious belief" and "is dedicated to furthering societal progress, enhancing quality of life, and enriching humanity's spiritual civilization". The Shaw Prize consists of three annual awards: the Prize in Astronomy, the Prize in Life Science and Medicine, and the Prize in Mathematical Sciences. Each prize carries a monetary award of one million two hundred thousand U.S. dollars.
The award has been compared to the Nobel Prize, which does not include a mathematics category.
Alon shares his glory with joint winner Oxford mathematician Ehud Hrushovski. Hrushovski was born in 1959 in Israel and is currently Merton Professor of Mathematical Logic at the University of Oxford, UK.
"Israel is a very prominent country in all sciences, especially in mathematics and computer sciences," said Professor Alon. "The status of the Israeli research in these fields in the world overpasses the relatively small population."