London: Two British researchers have won the most lucrative mathematics prize ever established, though the advances they are honoured for will leave most people baffled.

Richard Taylor, 52, and Simon Donaldson, 56, each receive $3 million (Dh11million) and a trophy as winners of the new Breakthrough prize in mathematics set up by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, and Yuri Milner, an internet entrepreneur.

The Britons are among five winners announced on Monday who will receive their prizes at a ceremony in California in November. The other winners are Maxim Kontsevich, 49, who is based in France, and Jacob Lurie, 36, and Terry Tao, 38, both of whom are based in the US. The five will now form a committee to decide next year’s winners.

The maths prize is the latest in a string of awards conceived by Milner, who quit the world of physics for business and made $1 billion from internet investments. The prize follows similar awards he has set up for fundamental physics and the life sciences.

Milner says the prizes are intended to elevate scientists and mathematicians to rock star status in the public eye. He hopes that celebrating and rewarding great minds will improve the lot of geeks in society and encourage more schoolchildren into the sciences.

“We think scientists should be much better appreciated. They should be modern celebrities, alongside athletes and entertainers,” Milner said. “We want young people to get more excited. Maybe they will think of choosing a scientific path as opposed to other endeavours if we collectively celebrate them more.”

In a statement, Zuckerberg, the 30-year-old chairman of Facebook, said: “Mathematics is essential for driving human progress and innovation in this century. This year’s Breakthrough prize winners have made huge contributions to the field and we’re excited to celebrate their efforts.”

Taylor, who works at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said he was stunned to hear that he was among the winners. “Having spent 10 minutes or so telling me about the prize, Milner said they would like to offer it to me. I was flabbergasted. I assumed he wanted to ask which of the mathematicians from the older generation were most deserving,” he said.

Taylor was a student of the Oxford mathematician Andrew Wiles and helped to bridge a troublesome gap in Wiles’s famous proof of Fermat’s last theorem. The story formed the basis of a prize-winning BBC Horizon documentary.

Having promised not to speak about the prize until the news was official, Taylor said he could now work out what to do with the winnings. “The trouble with these prizes is that they give the impression this work is done by a few people, but that’s certainly not the case. Everyone bases their work on other people’s work. I want to give something back, but I don’t have a plan because I’ve not been allowed to speak to anyone,” he said.

Taylor won the prize for breakthroughs in the theory of automorphic forms, which he says connect algebraic questions to symmetries of curved spaces similar to those seen in Escher’s woodcuts, such as Circle Limit III.

“It’s very abstract and that’s a great pity. To appreciate its beauty, you need a long apprenticeship, so it’s very hard to share widely,” Taylor said. “Mathematicians think on hard problems for years. When you’ve put in all that effort, and you suddenly see how it all fits together, that is a wonderful feeling. There is nothing to equal it.”

Donaldson, a maths professor at Imperial College London and Stony Brook University in New York, said: “I was quite taken aback. I haven’t had no time to think what I’ll do with the money. It’s hard to say what impact the prizes will have because they are so new. But one hopes they’ll increase the prominence of the subject in general.” Donaldson won the prize for “new revolutionary invariants of four-dimensional manifolds”.

Tao, at the University of California in Los Angeles, said that after paying off his mortgage and topping up his children’s college fund, he was keen to fund some larger-scale research projects. One already under way draws on the collective brainpower of multiple mathematicians to work on single problems.

Tao researches an apparent dichotomy in mathematics whereby some objects seem quite random while others are highly structured. For example, the digits of pi (3.14159) have no obvious pattern and behave like a random string of numbers. But mathematicians cannot prove that is the case. “There might be a hidden structure in pi that we simply haven’t discovered,” Tao said. “For me, I guess the main motivation is the satisfaction of finally understanding some tricky mathematical concept or phenomenon, and then explaining it to others.”

The prize has met with mixed feelings from other mathematicians. One prominent British researcher, who asked not to be named because he was sharing a personal view, said: “I find it interesting that they think it’s possible to make rock stars out of people who do something that 99 per cent of the population have no hope of understanding, and I include most professional mathematicians in that.

“I can’t understand what half my colleagues are doing. I could get there, more or less, with some work, but it’s technical, esoteric stuff. It can have huge ramifications through the world, though, they are right about that.”