BASIC SCIENCES

Yakov Eliashberg: “One of my contributions to the development of symplectic geometry and topology was to push the flexible and rigid sides towards the ultimate frontier between them.”

Claire Voisin: “Mathematical knowledge is essential to knowledge and intellectual life in general, because it is built on the universal principle that every statement has to be proved in order to be considered true.”

BIOLOGY AND BIOMEDICINE

Ulrich Hartl: “The medical relevance of molecular chaperones has become abundantly clear, especially in understanding neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.”

Arthur Horwich: “The beauty of the machine that prevents proteins from aggregating and produces the active, folded form leaves an indelible impression of the power of Mother Nature.”

Kazutoshi Mori:”Protein misfolding constitutes a fundamental threat to all living things. It is associated with the development and progression of various diseases such as cancer and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).”

Peter Walter: “The salient features of what we learned from simple, single-celled brewer’s yeast held true for human cells. These features now emerge as impacting players in a plethora of devastating human diseases.”

INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES

Takeo Kanade: “In the 1990s, I demonstrated reliable face detection by using neural net machine learning algorithms, a technology omnipresent in our cellphones.”

ECOLOGY AND CONSERVATION BIOLOGY

Gerardo Ceballos: “The sixth mass extinction may have catastrophic consequences. With the disappearance of species, we are eroding the ability to sustain life.”

Rodolfo Dirzo: “Human action has come to exert a counteracting force on the diversification trajectory of the biosphere, becoming the agent of what increasingly looks like a new mass extinction.”

CLIMATE CHANGE

Dorthe Dahl-Jensen: “It is truly fascinating to look into ice cores and see millions of small trapped air bubbles of the past atmosphere.”

Jean Jouzel: “Looking at the climate of the past is a key to understanding future global warming.”

Valérie Masson-Delmotte:”Ice cores are amazing time machines that have unveiled the magnitude and pace of global warming caused by human activities.”

Jakob Schwander: “We achieved the first reliable measurements of greenhouse gases trapped in air from the bubbles in ice cores.”

Thomas Stocker: “We have achieved fundamental knowledge to confront one of humanity’s greatest challenges: the safeguarding of our planet Earth, the only home we have.”

ECONOMICS, FINANCE AND MANAGEMENT

Partha Dasgupta: “Humanity is part of nature and human economy is embedded deep within it, yet still today biodiversity is absent from official economic reckoning.”

HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Elke Weber: “The international attention garnered by this prize will help to correct the misperception that the absence of adequate climate action is just an information deficit.”

MUSIC AND OPERA

George Benjamin: “Nothing is more exciting in the world than music. Music indeed defines beauty, and light and truth reside in harmony as nowhere else in existence.”