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Stanford associate professor Otis Chodosh received the 2026 New Horizons in Mathematics award from The Breakthrough Prize for helping settle questions on differential geometry that had existed since the 1980s.\u00a0<\/p>\nWhile Hollywood may be the city of stars, the Breakthrough Prize honored three Bay Area scientists with \u201cOscars of Science\u201d on Saturday in recognition for their efforts to answer questions that have eluded mathematicians and physicists for decades.<\/p>\n
The Breakthrough Prize, an organization founded by Silicon Valley titans of industry in 2012, awards $3 million annually for major scientific advancements to elevate researchers to celebrity status and inspire a new generation to tackle the greatest questions in mathematics, physics and life sciences.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope that all of these awards, not just the New Horizons, but scientific awards more generally, can bring a spotlight on what\u2019s happening in the scientific community,\u201d said Benjamin Safdi, a University of California, Berkeley physicist and 2026 New Horizons in Physics award winner. \u201cI hope that people read the stories from these awards and learn what people are doing and feel compelled by that to support science.\u201d<\/p>\n
Along with Safdi, the Breakthrough Prize awarded New Horizons in Mathematics awards to both UC Berkeley associate professor Yunqing Tang and Stanford University associate professor Otis Chodosh. Together, they represent the Bay Area\u2019s brainpower of the Bay Area\u2019s leading research institutions where the pursuit of knowledge has shaped the modern world.<\/p>\n
At the Sloan Mathematics Center at Stanford, Chodosh specializes in Riemannian geometry exploring the structural properties of spaces that often exist in higher dimensions. His award recognizes his contributions to settle several questions in differential geometry that had puzzled mathematicians since the 1970s and 1980s.<\/p>\n
\u201cMath is not quite a science, and it\u2019s not quite humanities. We have no experiment,\u201d Chodosh said. \u201cThey make hypotheses, we call them conjectures. And then the replacement for the experiment is called a proof. And so you essentially have a logical deduction, step by step.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stanford associate professor Otis Chodosh received the 2026 New Horizons in Mathematics award from The Breakthrough Prize for helping settle questions on differential geometry that had existed since the 1980s.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Chodosh\u2019s collaboration with fellow mathematician Chao Li proved a central conjecture in the field of \u201cscalar curvature,\u201d realted to shapes that can be continuously shrunk to a single point, in high-dimensional spaces. Then with Christos Mantoulidis and Felix Schulze, Chodosh resolved a key problem in the geometric analysis of minimal surfaces, such as a soap film spanning a wire loop.<\/p>\n
Mathematics research has changed immensely in the past 50 years, he said. The days of the secluded mathematician chalking up a blackboard have largely given way to a collaborative spirit as math has become increasingly technical. Like an enzyme that works as a catalyst to speed up a chemical reaction, collaboration ignites new ideas for conjectures.<\/p>\n
The same is true at UC Berkeley, where Tang worked with\u00a0Vesselin Dimitrov and Frank Calegari on the \u201cunbounded denominators conjecture\u201d to find a significant breakthrough in number theory and modular forms. It confirms that modular forms are not just random functions; they follow a rigid hierarchy. The beautiful order of math, she said, is like a language to her that she uses to understand the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese objects not only arise from the number theory aspect, they come from our understanding of the universe,\u201d Tang said. \u201cWhen (my colleagues) put everything into the mathematical language, everything suddenly makes more sense to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Yunqing Tang, the winner of the 2026 New Horizons in Mathematics Award, stands next to a chalk board with her award winning work at UC Berkeley in Berkeley, Calif., on Friday, April 10, 2026. (Shae Hammond\/Bay Area News Group)\u00a0<\/p>\n
With her office overlooking the Campanile to the south, she reflected on the historical achievements that had been made on UC Berkeley\u2019s campus, like Fields Medalists Richard Borcherds and Wendell Fleming. She said the math department is not only an example of prestige in her field, but a source of inspiration from working with her colleagues, students and post-docs that supports her to chase dreams \u2013 as long as there is funding for it.<\/p>\n
Safdi hopes the award will build public awareness of the sciences and grow support for additional federal funding. This comes as the Trump administration proposed a more than 50% cut in the National Science Foundation\u2019s budget<\/a>. He said that Berkeley is the \u201cbest place\u201d to study physics in the United States, and \u201cmaybe the world,\u201d but scientists like himself cannot do the work without financial support.<\/p>\n