Ben Recht, with his coauthor Emmanuel Candes, were awarded the Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization for their paper

"Exact Matrix Completion via Convex Optimization,"  Foundations of Computational Mathematics (2009) 9: 717-772

This prize is awarded jointly by the Mathematical Optimization Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, triennially, to an outstanding paper in continuous optimization from the preceding six years. It is one of a very select group of prizes awarded at ISMP, which is essentially the triennial world congress of optimization. 

A Q&A with Ben about the result can be found here.