By its Statute, the IMI Mathematics Prize is awarded to a Bulgarian citizen for excellent achievements in Mathematics. Candidates for the prize must not be older than 40 on the 1-st of January of the year in which the prize is given.

There are no restrictions for nominees related to dual citizenship or country of residence. The Prize is a plaque accompanied by a certificate and a cash award, for which funds are raised from donations. The amount of the cash award for 2014 is BGN 4000 as determined by the Scientific Council of IMI - BAS.

Members of the International Prize Committee for the IMI Mathematics Prize for 2014 are:
1. Vesselin Drensky (Sofia, Bulgaria) – chairman
2. Jonathan Borwein ( Newcastle, Australia)
3. Edward Saff (Vanderbilt, USA)
4. Luchezar Styanov (Perth, Australia)
5. Vidar Thomée (Göteborg , Sweden)

After careful considering of the 9 nominations for the Prize received, the Prize Committee has decided to award the IMI Mathematics Prize for 2014 to

Martin Kassabov,

Professor at the Department of Mathematics of the Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.

Martin Kassabov (born in 1977) defended his Master Thesis at the University of Sofia in 1998 and his Ph. D. Thesis at the Yale University in 2003 with advisor the Fields medalist Efim Zelmanov. At the age of 33 Martin Kassabov had a one year position as a professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Southampton, UK, and at the age of 34 he became a full professor at the Cornell University. He was also awarded with two very prestigious fellowships: the Centennial Fellowship from AMS for 2007 and the Von Neumann Fellowship of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, for 2009. In addition, Martin Kassabov is an invited sectional speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul, Korea, for 2014. His talk is at the joint meeting of two sections: the section of Algebra and the section of Lie theory and Generalizations. He is the second Bulgarian mathematician with such honor.

The main results of Martin Kassabov are in combinatorial group theory. He works very successfully on several topics in the theory of finitely generated groups – automorphism towers, topological completions of groups, finite simple groups, algorithmic properties, growth functions. Some of his results are obtained in cooperation with the best experts in the area as Alex Lubotzky, Aner Shalev, Robert Guralnik, William Kantor, Igor Pak, Mark Sapir, and, among them, with another brilliant young Bulgarian mathematician, Nikolay Nikolov from the University College, Oxford, UK.