Math & Physical Sciences

Gov. Newsom visits UC Berkeley to sign bill encouraging quantum innovation

October 4, 2025
Robert Sanders

two men talking in a lab surrounded by young people

Visiting UC Berkeley’s Campbell Hall today, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill to create “quantum innovation zones” across the state, positioning the campus as a leader in the race to establish California and the Bay Area as a center of an emerging economy.

The innovation zones will leverage California’s leading edge in quantum computing and research,...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/10/03/gov-newsom-visits-uc-berkeley-to-sign-bill-…

Nobelist George Smoot, whose satellite experiments validated the Big Bang theory, dies at 80

September 30, 2025
Robert Sanders

Smoot, a physicist at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting minute temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background, a prediction of the Big Bang theory.

a man in a brown leather jacket, blue shirt and glasses, with the Andromeda Galaxy in the background.

Physicist George Smoot told a packed press conference in 1992, “If you’re religious, it’s...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/09/29/nobelist-george-smoot-whose-satellite-exper…

UC Berkeley ranked No. 1 public school in the U.S. by the Wall Street Journal

September 30, 2025

Sather Gate with students in foreground

In new rankings released today (Monday, Sept. 29) by the Wall Street Journal and College Pulse, UC Berkeley was named the No. 1 public college in the country — the second year in a row it received the distinction.

Monday’s ranking comes one...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/09/29/uc-berkeley-ranked-no-1-public-school-in-th…

If You Want to Go Far, Go Together: Professor Ben Safdi

December 23, 2024
Avi Rosenzweig

Studying the physics of atomic particles takes a lot of room. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the biggest particle accelerator, is in a ring tunnel 27km (17 miles) long buried about two football fields deep underground. It serves as the factory, or artisanal manufacturer, of bespoke subatomic particles like quarks. But where is the design studio for these rare particle models? That would be the Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics (LITP)...

We Don't Make the Rules: Professor Geoffrey Penington

December 23, 2024
Avi Rosenzweig

The sketch of modern physics’ conundrum that we in the general public have a hazy picture of hasn’t changed for a hundred years. The cat is both kicking and has kicked, the electron is zipping around but we can’t know both where it is and how quick it is going, the particles are mysteriously linked in ways that appear faster than the speed of light, God does play dice, and so on. If Einstein couldn’t figure it out, what hope do we have?

...

Announcing the 2025 L&S First-Year Pathways Course Enrichment Grant Recipients

September 19, 2025

The UC Berkeley College of Letters & Science is pleased to announce the 2025 recipients of the inaugural L&S First-Year Pathways Course Enrichment Grants.

Now entering its third year, the L&S First-Year Pathways program has significantly expanded for 2025-26, growing from 6 clusters serving 125 students to nearly 20 clusters serving more than 230 students. L&S Pathways provides a small cohort experience for groups of 17-30 incoming freshmen who take "clusters" of three or four courses together...

AI revolutionizes weather prediction to help farmers in India

September 17, 2025
Robert Sanders

Co-developed by UC Berkeley's William Boos, an artificial intelligence-based weather model delivered a timely prediction of a stalled monsoon this season, helping farmers decide when to plant their crops.

Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing weather prediction around the world, as evidenced by the successful prediction this spring of a delayed onset of the monsoon in northeastern India.

The prediction gave millions of smallholder farmers the option of postponing planting to take better advantage of the rains or to plant different crops. Based on a preliminary...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/09/16/ai-revolutionizes-weather-prediction-to-hel…

‘Ten Martini’ Proof Uses Number Theory to Explain Quantum Fractals

August 25, 2025
Lyndie Chiou, Joseph Howlett

In 2003, Svetlana Jitomirskaya, who had spent years studying the almost-periodic function embedded in the Schrödinger equation, had just given up on her career-long goal of proving the ten martini conjecture. A year earlier, a competitor named Joaquim Puig(opens a new tab) had proved it for all but a few classes of irrational alpha values. What’s...

https://www.quantamagazine.org/ten-martini-proof-uses-number-theory-to-explain-q…

Captivated by the science of stars, this new student seeks energy solutions for Earth

August 27, 2025
Anne Brice

This article originally appeared in Berkeley News on August 25, 2025.

In this first-person narrative, incoming first-year student Inès Pajot tells UC Berkeley News about cofounding a climate coalition in high school and how her early interest in astrophysics will inspire her...

Scientists hack microbes to identify environmental sources of methane

August 14, 2025
Robert Sanders

Roughly two-thirds of all emissions of atmospheric methane — a highly potent greenhouse gas that is warming planet Earth — come from microbes that live in oxygen-free environments like wetlands, rice fields, landfills and the guts of cows.

Tracking atmospheric methane to its specific sources and quantifying their importance remains a challenge, however. Scientists are pretty good at tracing the sources of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, to focus on mitigating these emissions. But to trace methane’s origins, scientists often have to measure the isotopic composition of...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/08/14/scientists-hack-microbes-to-identify-enviro…