Mathematical & Physical Sciences

This year's Nobel Prize winners were invited to officially accept their awards from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in a special ceremony this week. UC Berkeley faculty John Clarke and Omar Yaghi were among this year's Nobel laureates, in addition to UC Berkeley alumni Michel Devoret and John Martinis. Among other festivities, the weeklong celebration featured lectures delivered by the Nobelists. John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis were presented with the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric...

The American Mathematical Society (AMS) awarded the 2026 Joseph L. Doob Prize to Maciej Zworski, UC Berkeley mathematics professor. Zworski shares this honor with Semyon Dyatlov (a former UC Berkeley faculty member), as the two are being honored for their 2019 AMS book, Mathematical Theory of Scattering Resonances. The Doob Prize recognizes "a single, relatively recent, outstanding research book that makes a seminal contribution to the research literature, reflects the highest standards of...

The L&S Staff Achievement Awards, now in its second year, recognize and celebrate outstanding staff members in the College of Letters & Science. Awardees are selected for their exceptional commitment to the College’s shared mission of teaching, research, and public service. Each of these individuals has excelled in areas such as collaboration, goal accomplishment, inclusion & belonging, innovation, and mastery of their work.

We are deeply grateful to our 2025 recipients for their remarkable contributions to the College and to the University. Their...

Since 2014, Lin Lin has served as a computational mathematician in the Mathematics Department here at UC Berkeley, though he might also be a quantum chemist in disguise. By combining insights from both fields, he is interested in designing new algorithms that harness the power of quantum computers to tackle challenging problems in quantum chemistry and scientific computing more broadly.

Showing early on the tenacity we come to expect in successful scientists, Lin sought out difficult problems when he went from small-town eastern China to Peking University for...