Two UC Berkeley L&S college members win New Horizons prizes for math and physics

Mathematician Yunqing Tang and physicist Benjamin Safdi had been honored for his or her early profession contributions.

Two younger UC Berkeley college members, Yunqing Tang of arithmetic and Benjamin Safdi of physics, are among the many winners of this yr’s New Horizons Prizes, awarded yearly by the Breakthrough Foundation to early-career scientists.

The announcement was made Saturday, April 18, at a gala awards ceremony for the Breakthrough Prizes in Santa Monica, the place six prizes of $3 million every had been awarded. Additionally, 15 early-career physicists and mathematicians had been acknowledged, together with Tang and Safdi, every of whom shared six $100,000 New Horizons Prizes. Three awards had been additionally given for girls mathematicians who’ve just lately accomplished PhDs.

Tang, an affiliate professor of arithmetic, shared the New Horizons math prize with Vesselin Dimitrov of Caltech “for work in Diophantine geometry, including the proof of the Atkin-Swinnerton-Dyer unbounded denominators conjecture and new irrationality results for special values of Dirichlet L-series.” The two, together with collaborator Frank Calegari of the University of Chicago, revealed their groundbreaking proof final yr, for which all three had been awarded the 2026 Frank Nelson Cole Prize for Number Theory.

A graduate of Peking University, Tang holds a 2016 PhD from Harvard University. After stints at varied analysis establishments, together with Caltech, she joined the Berkeley math college in 2022. Tang has additionally been awarded the SASTRA Ramanujan prize, a Sloan Research Fellowship and the AWM Microsoft Research prize.

Safdi, an affiliate professor of physics and member of the Leinweber Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Berkeley, was the only real winner of the New Horizons physics prize “for proposing new ways to seek axion-like particles with laboratory experiments and astronomical observations.” Axions are one of the standard candidates for the universe’s mysterious darkish matter, and Safdi has investigated varied methods of discovering them. In 2024, he proposed an astronomical way to detect them by in search of gamma rays from the core collapse of a big star right into a neutron star. In such an occasion, he argued, axions must be produced in copious portions and, upon escaping, be remodeled into high-energy gamma rays by the star’s intense magnetic discipline.

He acquired his undergraduate diploma from the University of Colorado at Boulder and his PhD from Princeton University in 2014. After appointments on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Safdi moved to Berkeley Lab in 2020 and joined the Berkeley physics college in 2021. He acquired the Department of Energy Early Career Award in 2018 and the IUPAP C11 Young Scientist Prize in Particles and Fields in 2020.