Clay Mathematics Institute
American foundation
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Through Mathematics
CMI is best known for its Millennium Prize Problems. It carries out activities, including conferences, workshops, summer schools, and a postdoctoral program supporting Clay Research Fellows.
Governance
The institute is run according to a standard structure comprising a scientific advisory committee that decides on grant-awarding and research proposals, and a board of directors that oversees and approves the committee's decisions. As of May 2026, the board is made up of members of the Clay family, whereas the scientific advisory committee is composed of Simon Donaldson, Michael Hopkins, Andrei Okounkov, Gigliola Staffilani, Andrew Wiles, and Martin R. Bridson. Bridson is the current president of CMI.
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2024 updates
2024 Clay Research Fellows
The Clay Mathematics Institute announced that Ishan Levy and Mehtaab Sawhney had been awarded the 2024 Clay Research Fellowships. Both were completing their PhDs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and started their five-year fellowships on July 1, 2024.
2024 Clay Research Conference and Workshops
The 2024 Clay Research Conference was held on October 2, 2024, at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. The conference was accompanied by workshops from September 30 to October 4, 2024. Notable workshops included:
- New Advances in the Langlands Program: Geometry and Arithmetic
- New Frontiers in Probabilistic and Extremal Combinatorics
- The P=W Conjecture in Nonabelian Hodge Theory
Awards and recognitions
Daniel Graham from the University of Surrey won the gold medal for Mathematical Sciences at the 2024 STEM for Britain competition for his work on quantum authentication methods.
Millennium Prize Problems
The institute is best known for establishing the Millennium Prize Problems on May 24, 2000. These seven problems are considered by CMI to be "important classic questions that have resisted solution over the years." For each problem, the first person to solve it will be awarded US$1,000,000 by the CMI. In announcing the prize, CMI drew a parallel to Hilbert's problems, which were proposed in 1900, and had a substantial impact on 20th century mathematics. Of the initial 23 Hilbert problems, most of which have been solved, only the Riemann hypothesis (formulated in 1859) is included in the seven Millennium Prize Problems.
For each problem, the Institute had a professional mathematician write up an official statement of the problem, which will be the main standard against which a given solution will be measured. The seven problems are:
- P versus NP
- The Hodge conjecture
- The Poincaré conjecture – solved, by Grigori Perelman
- The Riemann hypothesis
- Yang–Mills existence and mass gap
- Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness – OpenAI published a solution in September 2026 however the result has yet to be verified by the Clay Institute or the independent mathematical community and is the subject of a priority dispute.
- The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture
Some of the mathematicians who were involved in the selection and presentation of the seven problems were Michael Atiyah, Enrico Bombieri, Alain Connes, Pierre Deligne, Charles Fefferman, John Milnor, David Mumford, Andrew Wiles, and Edward Witten.
Other awards
The Clay Research Award
In recognition of major breakthroughs in mathematical research, the institute has an annual prize – the Clay Research Award. Its recipients to date are Ian Agol, Manindra Agrawal, Yves Benoist, Manjul Bhargava, Bhargav Bhatt, Tristan Buckmaster, Robert Burklund, Danny Calegari, Alain Connes, Nils Dencker, Yu Deng, Alex Eskin, David Gabai, Søren Galatius, Ben Green, Mark Gross, Larry Guth, Christopher Hacon, Jeremy Hahn, Richard S. Hamilton, Zaher Hani, Michael Harris, Philip Isett, Jeremy Kahn, Nets Katz, Laurent Lafforgue, Gérard Laumon, Ishan Levy, Aleksandr Logunov, Eugenia Malinnikova, Vladimir Markovic, James McKernan, Frank Merle, Jason Miller, Maryam Mirzakhani, Paul Nelson, James Newton, Ngô Bảo Châu, Tuomas Orponen, Rahul Pandharipande, John Pardon, Jonathan Pila, Jean-François Quint, Oscar Randall-Williams, Pierre Raphaël, Igor Rodnianski, Tomer Schlank, Peter Scholze, Oded Schramm, Scott Sheffield, Pablo Shmerkin, Bernd Siebert, Stanislav Smirnov, Jérémie Szeftel, Terence Tao, Clifford Taubes, Richard Taylor, Jack Thorne, Maryna Viazovska, Vlad Vicol, Claire Voisin, Jean-Loup Waldspurger, Hong Wang, Andrew Wiles, Geordie Williamson, Edward Witten, Joshua Zahl, and Wei Zhang.
Other activities
Besides the Millennium Prize Problems, the Clay Mathematics Institute supports mathematics via the awarding of research fellowships (which range from two to five years and are aimed at younger mathematicians), as well as shorter-term scholarships for programs, individual research, and book writing. The institute also has a yearly Clay Research Award, recognizing major breakthroughs in mathematical research. Finally, the institute organizes a number of summer schools, conferences, workshops, public lectures, and outreach activities aimed primarily at junior mathematicians (from the high school to the postdoctoral level). CMI publications are available in PDF form at most six months after they appear in print.