Dr Claudia de Rham and Dr Gustav Holzegel share the prize, which this year honours work in the mathematics of astronomy and cosmology.

The Adams Prize is awarded jointly each year by the Faculty of Mathematics and St John’s College of the Universty of Cambridge to UK-based researchers, under the age of 40, doing first class international research in the Mathematical Sciences.

This year’s topic was “the Mathematics of Astronomy and Cosmology”, and the prize has been awarded jointly to Dr Claudia de Rham, from the Department of Physics, and Dr Gustav Holzegel, from the Department of Mathematics at Imperial.

Professor Raymond E. Goldstein FRS, Chair of the Adams Prize Adjudicators, said: “Dr de Rham works at the interface of particle physics, gravity and cosmology. In highly influential work, she has constructed the first examples of nonlinear, ghost-free, theories of massive gravity — theories which could have important cosmological implications to our universe.

"Dr Holzegel works on the mathematics of general relativity. He has made groundbreaking contributions to the mathematical study of the stability problem for black holes — one of the most celebrated objects of astronomy. 

"On behalf of the Adams Prize Committee, I would like to congratulate both of them on winning the Prize this year.”

The Adams Prize is named after the mathematician John Couch Adams and was endowed by members of St John’s College. It is currently worth approximately £15,000. It commemorates Adams’s role in the discovery of the planet Neptune, through calculation of the discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus.