Terry Tao Awarded a Crafoord Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. (January 20, 2012)

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the four winners of the 2012 Crafoord Prize, an annual award that rotates between the disciplines of astronomy, mathematics, geosciences, biosciences and arthritis research. This year's honorees came from mathematics and astronomy, fields last recognized in 2008.

ScienceInsider reports:

The two awardees in mathematics were Jean Bourgain, a Belgian mathematician now working at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, and Terence Tao, an Australian-American mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Both Bourgain and Tao previously won the Fields Medal, often considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in mathematics (Bourgain in 1994 and Tao in 2006).
Tao is probably best known for his proof of the Green-Tao Theorem in 2004, which states that the prime numbers contain arbitrarily long equally spaced sequences (such as 5, 17, 29, 41, 53 -- a sequence of five primes spaced a distance 12 apart). This had been a major unsolved problem in number theory for decades. In addition to this very "pure" mathematics result, Tao is known for more practical work such as his invention, with Emmanuel Candes, of compressed sensing. This is an approach to image acquisition that greatly reduces the amount of raw data needed to reconstruct an approximate image—or even a perfect image—of natural objects.

Click here to read the full article and here to watch videos about the awards.