UK mathematician wins richest prize in academia

Martin Hairer takes $3m Breakthrough prize for work a colleague said must have been done by aliens

A mathematician who tamed a nightmarish family of equations that behave so badly they make no sense has won the most lucrative prize in academia.

Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the 2021 Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual $3m (2.3m) award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige.