2015 Shaw Prizes honor exoplanet hunting, bacterial communication, and number theory

South China Morning Post : The Shaw Prizes were established in 2002 by film mogul Run Run Shaw to honor advances in astronomy, mathematics, and the life sciences. Since then, seven of the awardees have gone on to receive Nobel Prizes in their fields. The 2015 Shaw astronomy prize has been awarded to William Borucki, the head of NASA’s Kepler mission, for advancing the efforts to find Earth-like planets. The mathematics award was split between Gerd Faltings of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, and Henryk Iwaniec of Rutgers University in New Jersey for their number-theory work that has provided tools for solving classical problems with everyday applications. The prize for life sciences and medicine was shared by Bonnie Bassler of Princeton University and E. Peter Greenberg of the University of Washington for their discovery of quorum sensing , a form of bacterial communication. Each of the awards comes with a $1 million prize, a medal, and a certificate.