The main reason it was dreamed up (by AlanGuth, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) was to explain the extraordinary uniformity of the universe.
Some of the winners, like Edward Witten, one of the most accomplished living theorists, and AlanGuth, the father of the theory of cosmic inflation, are well-known beyond the world of physics.
First introduced by AlanGuth of MIT in 1980 to explain (among other points) why the geometry of the universe appears to be flat and why matter is distributed so evenly throughout space, the theory also offered solid grounds for modeling how galaxies formed as the universe evolved.