Since 1978 the MacArthur Foundation has been doling out grant money in the United States and over 50 countries around the globe to help support creative minds working to positively impact the world and, in some cases, the institutions they serve. The MacArthur Fellowship, known colloquially as the “Genius Grant,” has been awarded to two Greater Boston residents in 2014, one a Boston-based civil rights lawyer and the other a Harvard mathematician.
According to the foundation, fellows will each receive a no-strings-attached stipend of $625,000, paid out over five years .
Twenty-one finalists were selected for the celebrated prize, twenty of whom are natives of the United States – the only foreigner hails from Denmark. Boston’s own Mary L. Bonauto, 53, has been the civil rights project director at the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) since 1990 and has been a stalwart advocate for marriage equality for same-sex couples.
“Basically my job in a big sense is about trying to eliminate double standards in the law,” says Bonauto in the video below.
Bonauto and her GLAD constituents were the driving forces behind landmark legal cases Baker v. Vermont (1999) and Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (2003), which allowed for same-sex couples to receive the same marital benefits of traditional couples, and legalized same-sex marriage in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, respectively.
“Mindful of the risks of loss and political backlash when social reform litigation advances ahead of public understanding,” wrote the MacAarthur Foundation of Bonauto, “Bonauto and her GLAD colleagues initially pursued an incremental, state-based strategy to secure government marriage licenses for same-sex couples in the New England states.”
Jacob Lurie, 36, is the other Bay Stater to share a piece of the MacArthur pie. Notes the foundation, “At an oversimplified level, he is transforming algebraic geometry to derived algebraic geometry—replacing the role of sets by topological spaces—making it applicable to other areas in new ways.”
Lurie has published thousands of pages worth of treatises and groundbreaking theorems, essentially helping to shape a new perspective for how people view and engage with mathematics.
“Mathematics is a playground filled with all kinds of toys that the human mind can play with but many of these toys have very long operating manuals. But some of them don’t and I think that there are a number of mathematical insights that are very interesting that you really could teach to someone in a freshman course,” Lurie says in the video below.
Congratulations to both of recipients of this tremendous honor.
