Russian billionaire and social media investor Yury Milner offers $3 million prize for achievements in fundamental physics - the most lucrative academic award in the world.

      Milner's newly minted $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize is much bigger than the $1.2 million Nobel Prize and the $1.7 million Templeton Prize for science and spirituality.

      The Russian billionaire inaugurated his new prize program for fundamental physics on Tuesday with a $3 million award to each of the nine of the world's best-known theorists. Milner, 50, a trained physicist, chose the first nine honorees himself, but he expects the future selection to be made by a special committee consisted of the first nine laureates.

      The first group of winner consists of three Russian scientists: Alexei Kitaev from the California Institute of Technology, mathematician Maxim Kontsevich of France’s Institute for Advanced Research, and Stanford's Andrei Linde. The other recipients are MIT's Alan Guth and four string theorists of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton: Nima Arkani-Hamed, Juan Maldacena, Nathan Seiberg, Edward Witten and Indian string theorist Ashoke Sen.

      The $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize will be awarded annually by the nonprofit Milner Foundation to honor "transformative advances in the field." There is also a special prize for promising junior researchers - the New Horizons in Physics Prize - with an annual ward of $100,000.

      "I am sure that the best scientists must earn no less than, for example, stock traders," Milner said. "If the award helps to encourage the greatest minds for the further work in the field of fundamental physics, I'll be deeply gratified"