Kudos to five outstanding mathematicians, especially Terence Tao.

"From today's NYTimes: "The...winners of the [$3 million Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics] are [Maxim Kontsevich, 49, of the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies outside Paris;] Simon Donaldson, 56, of Stony Brook University on Long Island and Imperial College London; Jacob Lurie, 36, of Harvard; Terence Tao, 38, of the University of California, Los Angeles; and Richard Taylor, 52, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J....Dr. Tao said [Yuri Milner, who funds the Breakthrough Prize with Mark Zukerberg] came to his office at U.C.L.A. in January. Mr. Milner had already announced that he would establish the math prizes, and Dr. Tao thought Mr. Milner wanted advice on whom they should go to. Instead, Mr. Milner told him one prize was going to him. Dr. Tao tried to talk Mr. Milner out of it, and suggested that more prizes of smaller amounts might be more effective in supporting mathematics. “The size of the award, I think it’s ridiculous,” he said. “I didn’t feel I was the most qualified for this prize.” ...Dr. Tao said he might use some of the prize money to help set up open-access mathematics journals, which would be available free to anyone, or for large-scale collaborative online efforts to solve important problems."Non-profit society publishers like to say that they put their revenue back into the scholarly mission of the society, including its journals, rather than pay it out as dividends to shareholders. That's true. Tao's plan would leverage part of his award money in the same cause to a greater degree. Here's what I mean. Some society revenue goes to conferences and administrative salaries, not to journals. Some society journals are non-OA and some are OA, that is, some society revenue is spent to erect access barriers and some to remove access barriers. If Tao carries out his plan, he'd support OA journals rather than non-OA journals. He'd support OA journals directly, without supporting entire societies to subsume them. Finally, instead of recycling academic funds for the benefit of academics, which societies do at their best, he'd redirect non-academic investment dividends for the benefit of academics. Mathematicians have a word for this. The word is elegant." ..."