The University of Cambridge has announced the winners of one of its oldest and most prestigious prizes.

Professor Tom Bridgeland (m.1991), of the Pure Mathematics Department at the University of Sheffield, has shared the Adams Prize for his highly original, deep and wide-ranging contributions to two branches of algebraic geometry, classical and non-commutative, of which a new synthesis has been stimulated by recent developments in string theory.

The Adams Prize is named after the mathematician John Couch Adams, and commemorates Adams’ discovery of the planet Neptune, through calculation of the discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus.