In another snippet of news, the Shaw Foundation that administers the annual Shaw Prize – the $1 million “Nobel Prize of the East”, on Thursday announced that the 2010 prize for astronomy has been awarded to Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins and Lyman Page and David Spergel of Princeton. The trio have received the award for “for their leadership of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) experiment, which has enabled precise determinations of the fundamental cosmological parameters, including the geometry, age and composition of the universe”.

Cosmic Microwave Background scientists have been real favourites on the prize circuit – take a look:

• Penzias & Wilson, 1978 Nobel Prize, for their CMB detection
• Peebles, 2004 Shaw Prize, predicted the CMB
• Alpher, 2005 National Medal of Science, predicted the CMB
• Smoot & Mather, 2006 Nobel Prize, for their work on the Cosmic microwave Background Explorer satellite (COBE)
• Mather & COBE team, 2006 Gruber Prize
• Bennett, Page & Spergel, 2010 Shaw Prize, for their work on WMAP.
  (… and I’m sure I’ve missed some…)

And quite right too – CMB studies of the last couple of decades have been massively influential in our understanding of the Big Bang, the earliest epochs of the Universe, and the origin of structure. I wonder if the Planck team will be just as successful?

Incidentally, nice to see that the 2010 Shaw Prize for mathematics was awarded to Belgian mathematician Jean Bourgain, who’s at Princeton. I don’t know him or his work, but as I haven’t seen it mentioned in any of the Belgian media I thought I’d flag it up here. Congrats!

Image: NASA / WMAP Science Team