Two UC Berkeley Scientists Just Won Awards for Tackling the Universe's Weirdest Problems

You know those moments when someone's just really good at their job? Like, solving-unsolvable-math-problems good, or hunting-for-invisible-dark-matter good? Yeah, two UC Berkeley faculty members just had a couple of those moments, earning themselves New Horizons Prizes for their early-career brilliance.

The Breakthrough Foundation, which sounds exactly like the kind of place that hands out awards worth millions of dollars (it is), announced the winners at a swanky gala in Santa Monica. Six main Breakthrough Prizes, each a cool $3 million, were also handed out. But let's talk about the other breakthroughs.

Making the Universe Make Sense

First up is mathematician Yunqing Tang. She snagged a New Horizons math prize, sharing the glory with Vesselin Dimitrov of Caltech. Their big win? Proving the Atkin-Swinnerton-Dyer unbounded denominators conjecture. Which, if you're not a math whiz, essentially means they cracked a seriously tough nut in Diophantine geometry, a field that studies polynomial equations with integer solutions. They also dropped some new knowledge bombs about irrationality results for Dirichlet L-series.

Tang, who joined Berkeley's math faculty in 2022, is no stranger to accolades. She's got a SASTRA Ramanujan prize and a Sloan Research Fellowship tucked under her belt, among others. Her work on that conjecture, published with Dimitrov and Frank Calegari, even earned them the 2026 Frank Nelson Cole Prize for Number Theory. Because apparently, the math world plans its major awards years in advance.

Then there's physicist Benjamin Safdi, who won a New Horizons physics prize all by his lonesome. His specialty? Dreaming up clever new ways to find axion-like particles. These aren't just any particles; they're a leading candidate for dark matter, that mysterious, invisible stuff that makes up roughly 27% of the universe and is currently playing a very effective game of hide-and-seek.

Safdi, who landed at Berkeley in 2021, has been on a relentless quest to unmask these elusive particles. In 2024, he proposed an astronomical detection method that sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie: look for gamma rays from a collapsing star. His theory? When a massive star implodes into a neutron star, it would churn out a boatload of axions. These axions would then conveniently transform into high-energy gamma rays thanks to the star's intense magnetic field. Which, if you think about it, is both impressive and slightly terrifying.

So, from solving ancient math riddles to shining a light on the universe's biggest mystery, these two are definitely making the rest of us feel like we should probably get back to our to-do lists. Or at least Google what an axion is, just to feel informed.