New York: Mathematicians, who are excluded from the Nobel awards, have finally got a lucrative prize of their very own and Australia's Terence Tao is proudly among them.

The inaugural Breakthrough Prize in mathematics - which nets the winner a whopping $US3 million ($3.2 million), compared to the $US1.2 million ($1.28 million) Nobel Prize - was awarded on Monday to five maths researchers. It is funded by Silicon Valley luminaries Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg.

Awarding excellence: Silicon Valley luminary Yuri Milner hopes to make science lucrative and cool. Credit:Getty Images

The winners are Maxim Kontsevich, 49, who works at the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies outside Paris; Simon Donaldson, 56, of Stony Brook University in New York and Imperial College London; Jacob Lurie, 36, of Harvard; Terence Tao, 38, of the University of California, Los Angeles; and Richard Taylor, 52, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Professor Tao, from Adelaide, was described by Professor John Garnett, also of UCLA as a Mozart of Maths in 2006.