The BHI would like to congratulate Andy Strominger and Cumrun Vafa for winning the 2017 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their pioneering work on black holes. We are so privileged to have them at Harvard! I just returned from Palo Alto, where the prize ceremony took place in the company of celebrities and other luminaries in life sciences and mathematics.
For more details, see the official public announcement,
https://breakthroughprize.org/News/34
Below is a photo of all 2017 Breakthrough Prize winners, including Rai Weiss and Kip Thorne for the LIGO discovery of gravitational waves from black holes mergers (with all LIGO members sharing this prize). When combined with the inauguration of the BHI, this is definitely the year when black holes are celebrated center stage. Karl Schwarzschild would have been delighted to know that his solution has such a profound impact, only 100 years after it was derived.