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Factbox - Breakthrough Prize laureates

Recipients of the 2nd annual Breakthrough Prize Award stand in a row while they are presented on stage in Mountain View, California November 9, 2014. REUTERS/Stephen Lam

MOUNTAIN VIEW CALIF. (Reuters) - Here are the Breakthrough Prize winners for 2014: LIFE SCIENCES - C. David Allis of the Rockefeller University for the discovery of covalent modifications of histone proteins and their critical roles in the regulation of gene expression and chromatin organization, advancing our understanding of diseases ranging from birth defects to cancer. - Alim Louis Benabid of Joseph Fourier University for the discovery and pioneering work on the development of high-frequency deep brain stimulation (DBS), which has revolutionized the treatment of Parkinson's disease. - Emmanuelle Charpentier of Helmholtz Center for Infection Research and Umea University for harnessing an ancient mechanism of bacterial immunity into a powerful and general technology for editing genomes, with wide-ranging implications across biology and medicine. - Jennifer A. Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for harnessing an ancient mechanism of bacterial immunity into a powerful and general technology for editing genomes, with wide-ranging implications across biology and medicine. - Victor Ambros of the University of Massachusetts Medical School for discovering a new world of genetic regulation by microRNAs, a class of tiny RNA molecules that inhibit translation or destabilize complementary mRNA targets. - Gary Ruvkun of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School for discovering a new world of genetic regulation by microRNAs, a class of tiny RNA molecules that inhibit translation or destabilize complementary mRNA targets. MATHEMATICS - Simon Donaldson, Stony Brook University and Imperial College London, for the new revolutionary invariants of four-dimensional manifolds and for the study of the relation between stability in algebraic geometry and in global differential geometry, both for bundles and for Fano varieties. - Maxim Kontsevich, Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, for work making a deep impact in a variety of mathematical disciplines, including algebraic geometry, deformation theory, symplectic topology, homological algebra and dynamical systems. - Jacob Lurie, Harvard University, for his work on the foundations of higher category theory and derived algebraic geometry; for the classification of fully extended topological quantum field theories; and for providing a moduli-theoretic interpretation of elliptic cohomology. - Terence Tao, the University of California, Los Angeles, for numerous breakthrough contributions to harmonic analysis, combinatorics, partial differential equations and analytic number theory. - Richard Taylor, Institute for Advanced Study, for numerous breakthrough results in the theory of automorphic forms, including the Taniyama-Weil conjecture, the local Langlands conjecture for general linear groups, and the Sato-Tate conjecture. FUNDAMENTAL PHYSICS (one prize, shared) - Saul Perlmutter, the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Supernova Cosmology Project Team; Adam Riess, Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute, and Brian P. Schmidt, Australian National University, and the High-z Supernova Search Team, for the most unexpected discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, rather than slowing as had been long assumed. Supernova Cosmology Project Team: Greg Aldering, Brian J. Boyle, Patricia G. Castro, Warrick J. Couch, Susana Deustua, Richard S. Ellis, Sebastien Fabbro, Alexei V. Filippenko, Andrew S. Fruchter, Ariel Goobar, Donald E. Groom, Isobel M. Hook, Mike Irwin, Alex G. Kim, Matthew Y. Kim, Robert A. Knop, Julia C. Lee, Chris Lidman, Thomas Matheson, Richard G. McMahon, Richard Muller, Heidi J.M. Newberg, Peter Nugent, Nelson J. Nunes, Reynald Pain, Nino Panagia, Carl R. Pennypacker, Robert Quimby, Pilar Ruiz-Lapuente, Bradley E. Schaefer, Nicholas Walton. High-Z Supernova Search Team: Peter Challis, Alejandro Clocchiatti, Alan Diercks, Alexei V. Filippenko, Peter M. Garnavich, Ron L. Gilliland, Craig J. Hogan, Saurabh Jha, Robert P. Kirshner, Bruno Leibundgut, Mark M. Phillips, David Reiss, R. Chris Smith, Jason Spyromilio, Christopher Stubbs, Nicholas B. Suntzeff, John Tonry. (Reporting by Sarah McBride; Editing by Douglas Royalty)